Contest Results and a Ginter-load

There can be only... two? And @Nachos_Grande nearly puts to bed my 2020 Allen & Ginter set.

 

With a wild championship game last night, March Radness has officially come to a close. For what I believe to be the first time in contest history, we had two people tie for first place. But there can only be one winner, so that's what the tiebreaker is for!

Jafronius picked Kansas to win 70-64, while ashbaugh88 predicted a 77-71 win. That means... oh crap. Both predictions were within 7 points of the actual final tally (72-69), which means we will have two winners this year for the first time ever. In third place was Josh W., while James20484 wins the worst place "prize". If your name is in bold, you are due a prize. Please contact me ASAP.

In other news, Nachos Grande dropped a truckload of Allen & Ginter base cards on my porch, which all but finished off the easy portion of the set. I'm only needing card #300 (Andres Munoz), a handful of slightly short printed cards, and assorted inserts and parallels to finish off the 2020 set. You know, no big deal. Considering I didn't even want to collect that year's edition, my want list has come a long way. It's nice to see.

I didn't want to bore you all with tons and tons of unremarkable base cards, so I picked out just a few to scan. We have a couple of TV show stars, including huge Cardinals fan and Bravo talk host Andy Cohen and that guy who passive-aggressively bickers with his wife on one of those house fixin' shows. You know the one I'm talking about.

Of course, Allen & Ginter isn't just about the non-sport subjects. We also get legends like Tony Gwynn in the '80s Padres brown gear.

Speaking of legends, it's Rickey Henderson from one of his stints with Oakland. I'm going to guess this is from his original run, based on the uniform design.

I feel like your young baseball star comes in a couple of different varieties. You have your no-nonsense ball of intensity (every team has one). Think... I don't know... early Bryce Harper. And then there's the guys who just look like they're happy to be there and are loving every minute of it. I prefer the latter kind. I think Vlad Jr. is the latter kind.

2020 was kind of a weird year for Topps rookie cards. You had some strange leftovers who starred the previous season, like 2019's AL ROY Yordan Alvarez. And then there was Gavin Lux and Luis Robert, who still had things to prove on the field. I think there was also a pile of players that were expected to debut in later series, but with the extremely short pandemic fueled season, the 2020 RC class ended up very empty in the end. I guess I don't really have a point to all of this, except that when I think of 2020 rookies I don't think of Yordan. And if I'm tasked with thinking of notable 2020 rookies, I guess there's good ol' Lou Bob and that's about it.