Penny Sleeve Preacher

George Herman “Babe” Ruth.  He was arguably the greatest baseball player to live.  He was the source of blessing for the Yankees, and a source of curse for the Red Sox, causing him to be one of the rare athletes to be in the pantheon of multiple franchises.  His homerun total of 714 is one of THE numbers in sports history, perhaps even the most well-known statistic in all of sports.    He single—-handedly made the homerun an integral part of baseball; an accomplishment that every modern day baseball fan should be grateful for.  His personality was larger than life, and his charisma drew people  to him.  He loved children, and made a habit of visiting orphanages and hospitals throughout his career.  His place on the “Mount Rushmore” of baseball history is rightly and richly deserved.  “The Babe” is a sports legend. But Babe Ruth wasn’t perfect, and though he did many good things in his life,  he was not perfect... but who is? ...

Just released!  First off, these are really cool-looking cards.  The design is really sharp, very vibrant.  The difference between the base set and the prospect base is subtle, subtle enough that I actually missed it until I sorted through the cards to put them in order.  The base set is 100 cards; 65 “regular” and 35 Top Prospects.   The big draw is 4 Autographs per box, 2 per each mini-box.  The Auto checklist is robust, and full of rookies and prospects, as you’d expect in any Bowman release.  Fortunately, in this year’s release, that includes Benintendi, Bregman, Judge, and Bellinger.  The mainline autograph checklist does include other top stars: Harper, Rizzo, Murphy, Bryant, Trout, among others.  But only approximately 10% of the auto checklist is established stars; lots of prospect potential.  On the autograph front, I pulled a Gleyber Torres, which is certainly nice, but the other 7 combined autographs were all regular prospec...

Over the years, Topps has forced education on a variety of topics onto collectors.  One of those, present in almost every set Topps puts out, is the topic of Short Prints (SPs for short).  In most sets, these are quite rare (see Heritage!!!!!!!), even in the flagship set - like the infamous Teddy Kremer SP from 2013 Update, which still has a list value of $200.  Most of the “good” SPs are ones typical collectors see only in pictures, but rarely feel like they have a good shot at pulling one themselves.  Over the last few years, the Update SPs have been easier to pull and have a lower value in exchange - somewhere between $5-15 over the past few years.  This year, the Update set goes even further, making SPs pretty easily accessible, and some cards having multiple short prints (the hard-to-pull ones become known as SSPs). On the one hand, this is frustrating, because when opening packs, collectors have learned to be excited when they pull a card that is clearly...

The 2016 Topps flagship set is a good set - the design is reasonably sharp, the photography continues to be excellent, and the checklist is what we’ve come to expect - Bryant, Trout, Harper - they’re all there.  The problem with Series 2 is that the rookie checklist is basically Gary Sanchez and Francisco Lindor - not bad, but not the quality of the Kris Bryant RCs from 2015 or the Aaron Judge/Cody Bellinger RC frenzy in 2017.  The result?  A jumbo box of 2016 Series 2 available for under $60.   I’ll be honest, I’ve never had great luck in mainline Topps hobby and jumbo boxes; very rarely have I pulled hits whose value exceeds the cost of the box.  So, with that as the backdrop, this was a pretty good box, and would have been a good box even at the standard initial price of approximately $100.   The Gerrit Cole relic is fine; there are certainly more desirable basic relics, but Cole is still an up-and-coming pitcher, so I feel like there were worse...

I collected baseball cards, some might say fanatically, as a kid.  Over the course of about 4-5 years, my brother and I amassed a collection that easily exceeded 100,000 cards.  When I was in 4th or 5th grade, we started to rent a table at a local card show 3-4 times a year, and between the 2 of us, we would make enough money to continue to feed the habit.  Then came the disastrous 1991 card season.  We had already started to struggle to keep up with the expansion of brands - managing to conquer Score in 1988, UpperDeck in 1989, and Leaf in 1990, but obtaining just a smattering of Stadium Club and Studio.  But in late winter of 1991, we decided to go big-time; we had the money (and parental approval) to buy a case.  After what I feel now was a lot of research for a 12- and 14-year old, we made our choice.  An apocalyptically horrible choice - 1991 Donruss.  Lest you forget, this was the first year Donruss decided to split their issue into two se...