Dime Box Doozies

Cause Smoltz was totally a "future" star after he'd already been in the majors for 17 years and established his HoF candidacy. Good job Upper Deck.

Ultra Amateur

Recently I've been putting some of my full and near full sets into binders. Thankfully I had a ton of Ultra Pro pages left from the late 90's that I never used. It wasn't until this week that I needed to buy more. I saw in walmart that they had Ultra Pro pages for sale in 35 page packs. The UP penny sleeves I've been buying at walmart I have been very happy with. But these pages...JUNK. The pages I have from back in the day are heavy, thick and sturdy. These new pages however are very thin and flimsy. The cards fit very loosely inside the pockets and I'm afraid the borders of the pockets will tear each time I slide a card in. The packaging says that the pages are "Made in the U.S.A." So maybe producing a crappy product is what they do so they can put that label on the packaging. I'm not sure how I feel about that...

Sorry for the rant.

A trip to the LCS and a...big(??) pull..what do you think?

Last week I was in the town with the closest LCS so I stopped in. I wasn't looking for anything in particular but I figured I would get something. I ended up spending about an hour talking to the father/son team that runs the shop. The father is getting up there in years and it really seems like the hobby as well as the business has left him behind. I say this not just because of some of the things he said but also because they have factory sealed boxes of Topps, Donruss, Score etc. from the late 80's/early 90's that are priced at $35+. These are boxes that I could get 3 for $5 from a dealer at the show in the area I've been to a couple times.

Talking to the son was much better. He's in his early 30's and really has a handle on the state of the card business. We talked a lot about his biggest pet peeves in dealing with the card companies, mainly putting redemptions in a product for players that haven't signed autos in years. This isn't an issue for me as I've never pulled a redemption but it is certainly an annoyance that makes sense.

But let's get to the cards. Pretty much everything in the shop is overpriced but I couldn't go in without buying something. They don't have a cheap singles box and the singles they do have are overpriced. So after quite a bit of looking back and forth and back and forth I decided on three things.

First of all I picked up a pack of 2001 Topps Gold Label. I recently received a few cards from the '99 version as part of a prize package from Brian at Play at the Plate and quite liked them. So I thought I would give this a shot. Here is a parallel base card from the pack.

Jermaine Dye Gold Parallel #084/999

One thing I love about this shop is they have mystery card grab bags for $5. Every bag contains a hit or a rookie card of a super star. I know that I'm unlikely to get a card worth $5 or more from this but its a fun thing to purchase. This is what I got.

059/100

Actually quite a nice card and the couple that are listed on comc are for more than $5. 

Lastly I decided to buy a minibox from 2007 Upper Deck Elements. I was not previously familiar with this set. Apparently one hobby box has three mini boxes with each containing a different type of base card. One mini box has foil board cards, another is LTFX cards which I believe are more contoured, and the last box has PETG acetate cards. Each mini box contains five packs with three cards. The box I bought was the regular foil board. Each hobby box is seeded with three hits: a relic, auto and an auto-relic with normally one in each mini box. There are also dual (#/15), triple (#/5), and quad (#/1) auto cards that are rare inserts. 

Here is what the base cards look like.

In the fourth pack I pulled this card

Well..it's a hit. A very meh hit. 

Then in the last pack...

Dual Elemental Autographs Jim Thome/David Ortiz 15/15

Well not only did I get one more hit than I expected but I got a big one. The thing is, I don't know how big. I asked the shop owner son what he thought the insertion rate was for this and he figured it was somewhere around 1:300 packs but said that was just a guess. Upper Deck was of course not kind enough to print the rates on the pack like Topps does (One thing I love about Topps). So I did some online research and can't find anything. Baseballcardpedia.com doesn't have insertion rates. Comc doesn't have any dual autos listed. Cardboard Connection never reviewed this product. And since Upper Deck seems to have never released the print run numbers I have no clue how rare this card is or what it might be worth. Does any one have any idea? 

2012 Topps Olympics blaster

The last box I picked up from Blowout was a 2012 Topps US Olympic Team blaster. I generally don't buy non-baseball products but I love the Olympics and I was intrigued by this set so I gave it a shot. The set is short on inserts but has a wide ranging base set. I got plenty of cards of big name US Olympians and some from people I've never heard of. Each pack included one bronze parallel with silver and gold parallels seeded 1:2 and 1:3 packs respectively. The only difference with the parallels from the regular base cards is the athletes name and the logo are in foil rather than ink. Here is an example of the base cards as well as each parallel.

I can understand having the same background for each card to accentuate the patriotic nature of the set. But I would rather the action shot cards, like those above of Lolo Jones, Allyson Felix and Jordyn Wieber, to have the background of the original shot. Posed photos, like that on the Tyler Clary card, make more sense to have a patriotic type background.

Overall this is an interesting set. I may pick up a hobby box in the future if the price is right.

A couple more hits

Recent Blowout purchase yada yada yada.

I also picked up a 2007 Upper Deck series 2 retail box and a 2011 Topps series 1 hobby box. Each contained one hit.

Nice! My first relic of a guy already in the Hall of Fame! The only thing is that the swatch looks and feels very modern. I thought back when Reese played they still wore wool jerseys. But the other Reese relics I looked up from all sorts of sets had many that looked similar as well as some that had a much more vintage look to them. So I don't know. Cool card to pull though.