Hobby Huntin'

The goodies from a 2006 Bowman Heritage box. 

Earlier this month, I had the opportunity to make the rarest of purchases: the vaunted hobby box. This one was available for a pretty good price and is a set that I at least passively collect, and needed plenty of.

I won't go into the details of everything I pulled, but you can check out what I'm still missing here.

There were three "hits" in the box, which sounds like is pretty much expected. My first one was this nice Chipper Jones bat card. In such an old product that's littered with "prospects", this was much better than what I was expecting.

There's probably someone out there with a full body suit of Todd Helton jersey pieces by now, but he was a very good player for a long time, so I can't complain about this. The pinstripe is a bonus.

Well, here's where the "prospects" thing comes into play. Matt Maloney did appear in parts of 4 MLB seasons with a couple of teams (Reds, Twins). At least the autograph is actually on the card.

There were some really cool box toppers that I had no idea about going into this. There was a full fledged two-sided posted with a mini scouting report for each of the 100 players in the prospects portion of the set, plus a checklist (in addition to the randomly pack pulled checklists). There was also the handy little sticker you see at the top of the post, which is meant to be affixed to one of those cardboard storage boxes you might store your set in. And there's also this pack, which I'm not going to totally spoil (check APTBNL tomorrow for details.)

I did pull a Cardinal out of the pack, though. Hey, Adam Ottavino... we remember you.

Mr. Haverkamp Delivers!

Older set needs and cool Cardinals stuff.

The man they call Mr. Haverkamp has been a frequent participant in my contests over the years, and also found the time to send over some cards I needed from my various want lists. (I need to pay him back... soon!) This particular stack of cards has been sitting in a particular box since early September, which means I really need to come up with a better system of organization. You can check out Mr. Haverkamp's want list right here!

The bulk of the cards I needed came from sets from the 2000's (as in, last decade). It's been awhile since I've knocked off any needs from the 2008 Allen & Ginter set, and I seem to recall these World's Greatest Victories cards being particularly tough to pull.

Check out Baby Dexter Fowler, on his 2006 Bowman Heritage Prospects cards. I do wish there was even a slight difference in design between the base cards in this set and the Prospects set, but, well, there isn't.

Here's Jack Wilson, a non-Prospect. He's wearing the very regrettable Pirates cap that fortunately disappeared with last decade. The classic 'P' is the only way to go.

Taking it all the way back to 2003, Mr. Haverkamp included a quadruplet of Giants cards from this older Bowman Heritage set. Ray Durham gets to represent the bunch here.

Obligatory Cardinals Card Alert! This here is a mini parallel from the 2008 Allen & Ginter set from one of my favorite players of all-time. It goes in the Cardinals collection.

From the Prospects of Yesteryear department, I can't say I know much about Eddie Degerman. I assume people called him "Da' German".

The 2003 Topps 205 minis are much more fragile than the later Allen & Ginter minis, even though they occupy roughly the same dimensions. This is a Polar Bear version of Jimmy Baseball's mini Topps 205 card. I didn't scan the back, so you'll have to take my word for it.

Actually, it turns out that I did scan the back, back in September when I first got this package and was adding this card to my The Trading Card Database inventory. So, there you go.

Why Do I Collect Steve Garrabrants?

It's more of a rhetorical question. 

Nothing against Steve Garrabrants, who I'm sure is a wonderful person, but when I win auctions on cards like this it really makes me wonder what I'm doing with my time. Garrabrants was a career minor league who spent 4 years in the Diamondbacks system. Like some of the players I mentioned in last night's post, he's more of an unknown. He's not from my hometown and I have no personal connection to him. He's not even pictured wearing the garb of my baseball team of choice. He's just a thing to collect, because I decided I wanted all of the things in the 2006 Bowman Heritage set.

I have a choice in these matters, but this is another reminder of how silly all this is. I never saw Mr. Garrabrants play, and I won't be able to tell anyone any stories about him one day. At least I will probably remember, at some point down the road, that Ruben Tejada got into a handful of games with the Cardinals back in the mid-2010s and couldn't do much to rejuvenate a sputtering defense or hit his way out of a wet paper bag. But Garrabrants? Maybe the Google overlords will spare Blogger for another decade or so and we'll have this blog post to remember.

Getting Spring Cleaning In Order

A trade post on a late Mon... wait, Tulo got traded?!

Angels fan Tom from "The Angels, In Order" is among the latest to send over some stuff in exchange for his participation in my Spring Cleaning event. We actually completed this swap a couple of months ago, but such is life when you're in perpetual catch-up mode.

This is a Pinnacle Inside card, which means this card was in a can. The card was in a can, man! That's wild.

As a youth, I remember the Boardwalk and Baseball set that Topps put out being something of a luxury item for whatever reason. I'm fairly sure that these go for pocket change in today's market, like most oddball '80s stuff. Maybe I had the name confused with the prized Monopoly property?

Tom hit up some of my Bowman Heritage wants, which is always appreciated. I'm still working on a solution for getting my want lists linked up in the mobile view of this blog. If only I knew someone who worked with computers all day and was smart about these things. (Time to punch myself in the face now...)

I have no idea who Richie Robnett is, but he apparently topped out at the AAA level in the 2009 season. I just appreciate a baseball card framed in a TV set design.

Oh yeah, and Tulo got traded. Wow.

Ugly But Useful

As a follow-up to last night's post about a giant package I received from The Sandlot, I thought I'd come back around and show off the meat of the trade, which allowed Joe to dump a massive amount of cards from a set nobody seems to love. I got into collecting Bowman Heritage cards mostly because the 2007 set, it's last to date, was still everywhere in stores and was really affordable. Heritage cards are usually thick and "cardboardy", and stand in such stark contrast to everything else that is released now that I can't help but gravitate towards them even though they can be so gimmicky. I've slowly acquired cards from previous Bowman Heritage sets, and after picking up a bunch of packs of the 2006 stuff at a card show, I felt compelled to put together a want list. That's where The Sandlot came in, and now I really feel like I'm getting somewhere.

Casey Janssen is an under-the-radar closer for the Blue Jays that I thought I'd be all sorts of clever about and pick him for nearly all of my fantasy teams. The Jays added a ton of players and I thought that wins would come with those acquisitions. They haven't really gotten there yet, but Janssen is still their closer so it's not yet a total calamity.

Getting back to this particular set, though - I'm struck by how ugly it is. Is this the real reason that Bowman Heritage ran its course and no longer exists, or is it just because they ran out of designs? I'd love to see Topps bring back Bowman Heritage (and ditch Gypsy Queen at the very least) just so I could collecting something new and cardboardy again. Surely they could come up with a mild tweak on an old design, or perhaps use something that Bowman did once that's a little more obscure.

Speaking of ugly, I don't miss the old Devil Rays uniforms. Evan Longoria's prospect card is one of the key cards in this set, so it was great to be able to pick it up in a trade.

In addition to the foil parallels that will never scan well, there are mini parallels all over this thing. The Cards just finished up a four game series with the Phillies, and I have to admit to being a bit surprised that Chase Utley looks to be finally back to 100%. If he was a Cardinal, he'd be due for an oblique strain right about now, but he's not. And, allegedly, he's what's known as a "gamer".

Joe also tossed in a healthy portion of 2006 Turkey Red set, which is always a treat. Put side by side with the Bowman Heritage set from the same year, I'd choose this stuff every time, even if it's thinner and less cardboardy. I just feel like a lot of care was put into each individual card in the Turkey Red sets, even if they aren't all winners.

Retired players just look better on Turkey Red than their present day counterparts. I never really got to see Palmer pitch as he was in full underwear pitchman mode by the time I was hitting my formative years.

A New Want List + Hits to Trade

I've added another set to the unfortunately growing list of things I'm chasing. I've been squirreling away a few 2006 Bowman Heritage cards over the past couple of years and finally found an opportunity to buy a bunch of packs at an affordable price. This inspired me to put together a want list, which should be live before I go to sleep tonight. In 11 hobby packs (at $1 each!), I managed to snag three hits, and they were all pretty nice.

Before I get into that, however, I wanted to address today's big Cardinals news - that Chris Carpenter is probably done as a major league pitcher. That's not shocking or anything, but I think most fans like we were hopeful that he might be back for one last hurrah after the man went and got a rib removed (!) last year just so he could pitch again. Wow. Unfortunately, it looks like the nerve issues that were causing all the problems are still lingering, and the team announced that they don't expect him to pitch this season. Ouch. Carp went from being a relatively obscure comeback story to pitching dominance to the kind of player that every fan of every team he doesn't play for completely hates. But that's okay with me, and there's no way the Cardinals win either of their recent World Series rings without him. He may never be a Hall of Famer, but he's a Cardinal Hall of Famer - a Willie McGee, if you will.

On to the hits! This is an on-card Alex Gordon autograph. While Keith Olbermann was buying up all of the so-called mistakenly printed Gordon cards in the Topps base set, the Bowman arm cranked out a much nicer card that any Gordon fan would love to own. I almost don't want to get rid of it and I couldn't care less about the Royals.

It's Ryan Howard! And a pinstripe! Usually when I pull jersey cards out of a 7 year old pack, it ends up being Morgan Ensberg.

Gary Sheffield and a chunk of his bat? This is numbered 04/49. Maybe it was the batboy's bat. Maybe the bat came from Sports Authority. Who knows?

There were other Cardinals (not for trade!) in the packs that I opened, and one of them was a mini Juan Encarnacion.

Adam Ottavino had a cup of coffee with the Cardinals but never panned out as a prospect. He resurfaced last year as a league-average reliever with the Rockies.

Brad Furnish didn't fare so well.

Topps Heritage's Cousin That No One Talks About

For as much as I have enjoyed Topps Heritage through the years, I've been drawn to the Bowman version for the same reasons. I like the thick, old-school cardboard stock, the lack of UV coating and the sometimes interesting player selection. That being said, some of the designs that Topps paid tribute to with the Bowman line were pretty lacking. The 2006 set is such an example. Based somewhat loosely on the 1949 Bowman baseball design, the wrapper is actually probably my favorite part. That being said, it's still a lot better than the base Bowman set.

Here are the results of a couple of packs I bought last month.

Pack 1:

29 - Kevin Millwood Mini (One nice thing about these packs: each one has a mini. Minis are always good, right? Blogger likes to make minis larger than regular sized cards on me for some reason. You'll just have to pretend that I made them bigger because I like them more.)

BHP1 - Justin Upton Prospects (Each pack also comes with two Prospects cards as is the usual M.O. of Bowman products. The design, however, is exactly the same as the regular base set as far as I can tell.)

BHP20 - Mark Holliman Prospects

269 - Lance Berkman Foil (Each pack contains one extra thick foil card. I would show you what they look like, but it's Lance Berkman and we can't have any of that around here.)

242 - Tony Pena

43 - Carl Crawford

156 - Kerry Wood (Wood finally got his first save of the season the other day.)

267 - Randy Johnson

Pack 2:

298 - Matt Cain Mini (It's miniature, I swear!)

BHP79 - Andrew Carpenter Prospects

BHP54 - Steve Kelly Prospects (No, I haven't heard of him, either.)

292 - Hong-Chih Kuo Foil (Here's the long-awaited foil scan. It's really not much to look at. The 2007 set decided to make these shinier and rainbowy.)

72 - John Smoltz (The Cardinals have hit their first pair of injuries with the rotation. I wonder if someone in the front office has Smoltz on their "friends and family" plan.)

149 - Francisco Rodriguez (I'm not wild about those shades. Batters need to see the crazy eyed look of the closer to feel truly intimidated.)

191 - Chad Tracy

243 - Josh Sharpless

- Checklist 1 of 3

I'm not collecting these, exactly, but I'm not getting rid of them. This set joins a number of others (2004 Bowman Heritage, 2000 Upper Deck, etc.) in limbo in my collection.

2006 Bowman Heritage

There are supposedly white parallels in this set, but for the most part the different versions are not distinguishable to me. For the purposes of collecting this set, either version of the card will work.

Want List: 

4 Jason Bay
6 Alex Gordon
11 Freddy Sanchez
12 Jermaine Dye
16 Chipper Jones
23 Justin Morneau
25 Ken Griffey, Jr.
32 Dontrelle Willis
35 Ivan Rodriguez
37 Jhonny Peralta
38 Yadier Molina
39 Eric Chavez
45 Jorge Posada
56 Frank Thomas
100 Alex Rodriguez
102 Jeff Francouer
147 Placido Polanco
150 Ichiro
155 Roger Clemens
178 Garrett Anderson
187 Jose Castillo
229 Adam Jones
263 Mike Piazza

(SP)
202 Alay Soler
204 Mike Napoli
208 Josh Willingham
214 Boof Bonser
216 Justin Huber
224 Scott Olsen
226 Martin Prado
228 Kevin Thompson
230 Josh Johnson
238 Adam Wainwright
250 Justin Verlander
256 Jason Giambi
258 Carlos Beltran
260 Pedro Martinez
262 Melvin Mora
274 Michael Young
278 Melky Cabrera
280 Josh Barfield
288 Sean Marshallo
292 Hong-Chi Kuo

(Prospects)
BHP93 Brooks Brown

(Mini Draft Pick Variations)
BHP78 Steven Wright
BHP83 Adam Ottavino
BHP87 Chris Parmelee
BHP89 Chase Fontaine
BHP91 Jamie Ortiz
BHP92 Sean Watson
BHP94 Brad Furnish
BHP95 Chad Huffman
BHP99 Tyler Norrick
BHP100 Brent Sinkbeil

The following is a list of parallels that I HAVE from this set. I am looking for anything NOT on this list:

Foil: 4, 5, 6, 8, 14, 15, 17, 18, 19, 22, 23, 36, 39, 40, 44, 48, 49, 51, 54, 55, 66, 68, 69, 70, 71, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 84, 86, 89, 91, 92, 94, 98, 100, 102, 106, 108, 111, 114, 118, 119, 121, 123, 125, 127, 129, 134, 136, 137, 139, 141, 142, 145, 149, 155, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167, 171, 174, 182, 183, 189, 191, 192, 195, 198, 201, 202, 204, 206, 209, 210, 213, 215, 219, 228, 229, 233, 234, 235, 237, 239, 240, 242, 243, 246, 249, 255, 256, 257, 260, 262, 264, 265, 266, 269, 271, 274, 280, 284, 287, 289, 290, 292, 293, 294, 295, 297, 300

Minis: 2, 4, 6, 8, 11, 12, 17, 18, 21, 22, 25, 29, 30, 31, 32, 39, 43, 44, 45, 46, 52, 53, 54, 56, 58, 60, 61, 63, 64, 67, 73, 75, 76, 80, 82, 85, 90, 92, 97, 99, 102, 104, 112, 113, 114, 115, 117, 120, 121, 122, 125, 126, 129, 130, 132, 135, 137, 140, 143, 145, 146, 147, 151, 152, 153, 155, 157, 158, 159, 162, 163, 165, 169, 170, 173, 175, 177, 178, 180, 181, 182, 184, 186, 187, 188, 189, 190, 192, 195, 196, 208, 212, 217, 219, 220, 221, 222, 225, 228, 232, 235, 236, 237, 238, 241, 242, 247, 253, 255, 256, 257, 261, 264, 265, 266, 267, 268, 269, 271, 272, 273, 279, 280, 284, 286, 287, 292, 293, 294, 298, 299, 300

[updated 7/20/26]