March Radness VIII: Get Your Mouthguards Out

Be the right combination of smart and lucky and you could win some free cards.

For the eighth straight year, I am holding a NCAA bracket contest. If you're new, curious or just didn't get an invite for some reason, this is just another reminder that the contest is open to all Cards on Cards readers, passers-by and lookie-loos. Read further on for instructions.

One thing I should clarify up front if you don't follow college basketball (and as anyone who might be familiar with my own bracket-picking history should know, I really don't)... the field hasn't been selected yet. Conference tournament games are still happening. Everything will be set by this Sunday evening, at which time I will send out some more reminders. You'll have a few days to make your picks at that point.

One of the requirements is having an ESPN account. ESPN should hopefully not ask you for any invasive information as part of the conditions for signing up. If they do, please tell me immediately and I'll consider other options. If you absolutely, positively refuse to sign up for one of those things, go ahead and send me your bracket before the deadline in some sort of legible form and I'll send you a prize if you manage to pick a lot of winners. 

ESPN's default scoring rules apply. Play-in games do not count because they are dumb and no one pays attention to them. Should you choose one of the play-in winners to advance in the real part of the tournament, not only do you do so at your own peril but you also have the advantage of showing success no matter which play-in team makes it in. PLEASE make sure you fill out the entire bracket, including the tie-breaking final score of the final game. I hate to disqualify people for not filling everything out, but it seems to happen every year.

What's the incentive here? Other than bragging rights, the first prize winner will receive a 2016 Topps Heritage or 2016 Topps Gypsy Queen baseball blaster (your choice!) Three runners-up (runner-ups?) will receive prize packs for their MLB or NBA team of their choice including no less than one certified autograph or memorabilia card (or both?!). Worst place will receive something truly terrible. You will be scared to check your mailbox for weeks.

If you'd like to participate, click here and click on the "Get Started" button (password = marchradness). The deadline is the morning prior to the first real (non play-in) tournament game on Thursday, March 17th, though I would suggest getting your bracket done by the night before just to be safe. Leave a comment here or send me an email if the invite link doesn't work or if you are otherwise having trouble joining up so I can send you a direct invitation.

A Canadian and a Gentleman

Treasures of the North. 

It's not every day that someone contacts me about a low level minor league team set from 1988, but I'd be a fool to send that email straight to the trash, right? The Cardinals had a short season class A team in Hamilton, Ontario for five seasons before they relocated back to the States, and recent trade partner (and Cleveland Browns fan) Dawg Day Cards happened upon the team set in question and sent it my way. I'm familiar with the gold 1988 ProCards design because, if memory serves me, my very first minor league team set was a Portland Beavers set from the same year.

Mark Clark was the only player I'd heard of in the entire set, which isn't all that surprising considering the success rate of low minors players. I did get quite a kick out of this J.P. Gentleman character, and am considering using this as an alias when I get ultra famous and need to travel incognito on the road.

As with our previous trade, Angus sent some absolute O-Pee-Chee gems that were lacking in my collection.

You could pretty much grab any '70s OPC card out of a hat and there would be a more than favorable chance that I wouldn't own it. This will slide in along side Red's Topps counterpart in my binder.

Three batting leaders are featured here in OPC form, not that you can tell by the front design, of course. But there's only one of these folks that I am concerned with, and he's currently a big shot executive in the MLB office these days. La dee da.

February's Loot

My @thelootlocker box from February. It had stuff.

It seems like it was only a few days ago that I was posting about my first box from The Loot Locker. I had fun with that first one, so I decided to snag one again after seeing which packs were selected this time around. Once again, there were four hobby style packs of baseball cards along with some extra supplies from Ultra Pro and some sugary treats.

2015 Bowman's Best

This was the biggest draw for me, having enjoyed my pack last month. You can see the entirety of this pack over at APTBNL. I thought the Whitley card was the most interesting (and shiniest). I could just go out and buy a box of these, but they're going for around $95 (or roughly $8 a pack). Too rich for my blood, although I can afford The Loot Locker's price point where you get all this stuff for the price of a blaster.

2015 Topps Chrome

89 - Javier Baez - I've already opened more than a few 2015 Topps Chrome packs. This product is only ever going to be as good as the flagship design can take it, which is why it's so disappointing that the 2016 design flat out sucks. I'm not going to enjoy the Chrome version either.

94 - Ryan Howard - With Howard's contract most likely coming to an end after this season, he's passed the torch of Worst Contract In MLB to Albert Pujols. That's a shame, because Pujols was always the much superior player.

131 - Miguel Alfredo Gonzalez Refractor - The Cuban import Gonzalez has rather famously been a complete bust, but hey, at least he has three names.

121 - Anthony Rizzo - This pack was half Cubs. Not good.

2015 Bowman Chrome (Pack 1)

153 - Ichiro - I keep forgetting that Ichiro is still around. That's sad.

PP-24 - Henry Owens Prospect Profiles Mini - This is kind of the size of a normal card with the sides cut off. I wonder what Topps did with the end pieces.

BCP229 - Luis Ortiz Prospects

38 - Stephen Strasburg

2015 Bowman Chrome (Pack 2)

128 - Yoenis Cespedes Gold Refractor (41/50) - This was the big hit of the box, with Gold Refractors being a decently difficult pull at 1 in 204 packs. It's too bad Cespedes has changed teams so many times recently as I bet this isn't a very interesting card for a Tigers fan.

BCP208 - Alex Jackson Prospects - Jackson is not legally allowed to drink. Sometimes facts like these creep me out.

BCP180 - Brandon Nimmo Prospects - I got one of his cards last time around, only it was Bowman's Best.

118 - Addison Reed - And we finish it up with a former closer.

Airbrushed Fridays: Farewell to Photoshop

Making Their Mark, indeed.

My fatigue with Topps and their flagship product is spilling over into my long-running "Airbrushed Fridays" series, which I'm effectively ending with this post. I introduced Photoshopped cards into the series long ago because it was kind of fun to look at how photos are doctored on modern cards in modern times. Sometimes this was born out of necessity (switching teams) and sometimes for no good reason at all (like when a team gets a new uniform set.)

Now that Photoshopping and digital enhancements in general is pretty much the standard operating procedure for all of these cards, I'm kind of tired of talking about it. I leave you with one last card. Guess where the photo for this 2013 Topps Making Their Mark insert of the Tsunami man himself, Carlos Martinez, came from?

Well, you don't have to go very far. Just check out his Topps Pro Debut photo from the same year.

I may revive the series at some point as a vintage-only thing if I build up enough of a cache of old school airbrushed cards. Until then, feel free to enjoy the very excellent (and occasionally R-rated) Baseball Card Vandals site and/or Twitter feed.

Walk Off Wins

Cross two more inserts off the 2016 list.

A Bryan and a Brian brought me closer to never having to think about 2016 Topps Series One again with a couple of small envelopes. First off, Golden Rainbow cards sent over a pair of want list needs recently. David Freese's massive World Series in 2011 is the gift that keeps on giving, and he keeps finding himself on Cardinals checklists despite being traded away more than two years ago. The St. Louis native will never have to pick up a check in his hometown for the rest of his life.

Lance Berkman was also a huge part of the improbable 2011 run. His time with the Cardinals was brief, but he was tremendous when he was there.

Brian from Highly Subjective and Completely Arbitrary sent along some cards including another of the 2016 retail-exclusive inserts, with Allen Craig's mad stumble from the 2013 World Series being recognized on cardboard. A Sportflics-style card would have suited this moment better, and I'm sure no one wanted a photo of Craig on the ground, so here we are. Unfortunately, the 2013 series didn't turn out as well as 2011. Moving on.

I've opened a ton of packs of 2002 Upper Deck World Series Heroes because they frequently seem to be in dollar bins, but the rookies from the set are a pretty tough pull. I am definitely happy to cross this card off my list (which doesn't actually exist for these years, but whatever.)

Carlos Villanueva filled the long man role last season and did it well, although his appearances were few and far between. A 100 win team doesn't often have a lot of use for a mop-up guy. This year the role could be handed to Rule 5 Draftee Matt Bowman, but let's hope they don't have a lot of reason to use it once again.

Let's wrap this up with a shiny X-Fractor. Nice.

Shots Fired

I'll never get organized at this rate.

Jaybarkerfan fired the opening salvo of what will go down in the annals of history as The Great Trade Wars of 2016. The always generous JBF got the #supertraders thing up and running. Here's just a few of the great Cards on cards that he sent my way.

Topps will never cease with the parallels, and I'm still needing quite a few of these horror glitter cards. Horror glitter... can we make that a thing? Maybe it's already a thing.

I really like the Fleer Greats sets of the '00s. It really makes the Upper Decking of Fleer all the more frustrating. All of this happened during a time I didn't really collect cards, but it's not like one mere card collector could have done anything to stop it.

Hmm, let's just put all of the league's logos on the same card and make it look like a computer program is selecting the right team. (I guess that's what they were going for here?)

Keith is just leaning into this card with a little bit of uncertainty in his eyes.

This one is going in the binders, of course, but I'm tempted to find a bunch of Mark McGwire stickers to stick on things all around my neighborhood. Could be fun and confusing!

One of my goals this year is to put some money that I would have normally spent on Topps flagship towards stuff like the older Bowman Heritage sets. I'll probably have to work my way backwards, but it'll be fun.

2016 Topps Flops

My first and last look at 2016 Topps Series One. 

I've made a little noise about giving up on buying Topps flagship products for the foreseeable future, but you can't honestly judge something until it's right in front of your face. I'm not giving up on being a team collector, so I went in on the Cardinals from a jumbo group break hosted by Nachos Grande.

Here is the entire team set from Series One. At only 9 cards, this likely leaves a lot more players for Series Two, though the Cardinals probably won't be as highly represented in this year's products as they have in the past now that everyone is in love with the Cubs. Kolten Wong, Trevor Rosenthal, Randal Grichuk and whoever our first baseman is going to be this year are among the missing.

I'm going to try to contain my rant here and just hit some key points.

1. I was already getting worn out on the flagship set long before this. I'm just tired of the thin white glossy cards that they churn out year after year. Buying the packs started feeling like more of an obligation than an intrigue.
2. Specifically, I strongly dislike this year's design because they have done away with the backgrounds. Half of the fun of baseball cards is that they become some sort of historical record. There's stats on the back of how that player was doing and a photo on the front. It could be a night game, a day game, some awkward photo shoot or an early spring training moment. It was only three years ago that we got the amazing Jon Jay card from a key moment captured on film (and card) from late in the 2012 season. All of the players on these cards are lost in a fog. I realize that sets like Allen & Ginter remove the background completely from the equation, but expectations are different for that set.
3. The success of Topps's digital trading card products seems to have bled into their decision making process for the physical flagship set. There's been a lot of chatter on Twitter about this where some folks with ties to Topps have defended the process and denied that there's any relation between the decision making process across both the physical and digital teams. It makes sense that they'd say that, but I suspect that Topps BUNT is making the company a lot more than they expected (with the crossover success of the Star Wars digital cards) and money usually drives decision making processes more than anything. It seems impossible that scalability to the digital product had no impact, since they effectively share the same design. Even if this is truly not the case and that BUNT had no impact on what design was chosen, I don't like the direction that Topps is heading in.

On to the rest of the cards. This is one of the rainbow foil parallels, although it's not evident by the scan as is usually the case. These are similar to last year's parallels.

I landed a short printed photo variation of Jhonny Peralta in a camo jersey. There are two more of these to track down, including a so-called SSP Yadi card.

Similar to reprint style inserts from the 2010 and 2011 sets, Topps is honoring the designer of the legendary 1952 Topps set Sy Berger with a reprint insert set. I'm not sure why Carlton's 1967 card was chosen over his rookie card. Maybe there are licensing issues with the "other guy" on the card, Fritz Ackley?

It's not the most expensive card in the world, but this is probably the closest I'll come to owning a Pujols 2001 Topps Traded card unless I happen upon a generous trader or find an absolute steal on one.

I have a few of these originals, though.

I don't even know what to say about this. Who would want these? No one wants these.

This was a neat idea for an insert set, but there's no reason for Stan's inclusion here since they clearly don't have a photo of him actually pitching. Instead, we get a photo we've seen used a million times before, which is an unfortunate problem with certain HOFers that's never going to go away.

Does this mean they're going to start having insert sets for other stadium anniversaries?

We've seen Topps do the combo insert thing nearly every year, but it doesn't work as well when the cards aren't landscape (horizontal) in my opinion.

I had already read quite a bit of backlash about these Perspectives inserts, and with good reason. Here, Topps takes some nice photos (hint, hint, your base set design SUCKS and needs more photos like this) and completely ruins them by throwing in this weird 3D rendered lettering that look like it's straight out of a Windows 95 screensaver.

WHY?!

These would have looked so much better with a player name in small writing, out of the way... in the bottom corner or something.

I landed a buyback in the form of a 1974 Rich Folkers. The stamps are color-coded this year according to rarity, and this is apparently a "rare" one. I don't think 1974 Rich Folkers cards are exceptionally rare, though. Just to be clear, the foil stamp itself is the true rarity.

The game-used cards look nice. I have no complaints here. I need to track down Michael Wacha and Yadier Molina's cards at some point.

My 2016 want list is up to date. I'm only missing some retail-only inserts, parallels and rare stuff. If you have anything like that, let me know. Also, if you need a Cardinals team set for some reason, I have several extras.