Who's hot / who's not?
Most people survived the opening week of the big NCAA tournament with at least their champion intact, but there were some crazy results nonetheless. Big time Cardinals fan (and Ray Lankford supercollector) rl16 is the leader currently, with the most points and most maximum possible points at this point. Henry Blanchette and sandyrusty are hot on the heels of 1st place, however. Bringing up the rear is James20484, who I will assume is not a bot and is an actual human that likes numbers.
To shift focus back to baseball cards, I bought a couple of retail fat packs from sets I hadn't checked out yet. I won't be collecting either of these sets, but they're an affordable boredom reliever.
The new Donruss set is certainly... something. Back once again are a slew of variations, along the same lines as last year's photo and nickname variations. It appears that all of the Red Sox players have variations where the team name is switched to "Titletown", which is just kind of obnoxious.
For the Diamond Kings subset, Panini draws heavily from the 1985 Donruss set, which is good by me.
The last 50 cards in the set are also '85-inspired, including this card of a guy I honestly had to look up despite his team being St. Louis. It turns out he had one plate appearance with Tampa Bay, which makes him eligible for a rookie card. He was part of the Tommy Pham trade last season and likely won't figure into the Cardinals plans for awhile.
Do any of Kyle Freeland's teammates call him "Ace"?
This is a parallel color that's exclusive to the retail jumbo packs. It looks nice, but it isn't the best look for Pittsburgh.
Nick Martini spent 7 seasons in the Cardinals minor league system before another team finally gave him a shot at big league playing time.
Here's a pretty slick insert of a player people like to collect. I think this is a parallel of an insert, the most evil of all things.
I also bought a Topps Opening Day pack. Opening Day cards to me mainly mean two things. One of them is Photoshop!
Here's a new insert design for this season. Oh sure, it was all "Fun" and games for Jackie.
These blue parallels haven't been serial numbered in years, but I still think their print run is set to the year it's made.
The other thing Opening Day is known for, of course, is mascots.
Tom Seaver approves!
I love new Jackie cards, but maybe featuring him on a “fun” insert seems a bit dumb. Good catch.
ReplyDeleteI can't figure out that to make of Donruss, but I think some of the parallels and inserts look decent.
ReplyDeleteI'm still hung up on the lack of logos to truly appreciate Donruss, but I gotta say... that Betts DK is a cool card.
ReplyDeleteAll good cards. I'm OK with the titletown moniker. Of course I like Boston but would still like it applied to each champion every year. Good stuff.
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