2017 Bowman’s Best - 2-Box BREAK!

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 prospects, and the return on investment will be achieved by playing the long game; no immediate impact.

There is an assortment of inserts as well, but the coolest one is the Dean’s List, which features each prospect’s Baseball America grade. I was lucky enough to hit a Clint Frazier parallel of this insert, numbered to 50, which may have been the best pull of the two boxes combined.

I did pull a Brett Phillips Orange Parallel #/25, which was nice, but not really enough to redeem the box.

If you’re into cool cards, and want to add some flash to your personal collection, and are willing to roll the dice for some high-end autos, this is a good avenue for that. Both boxes featured a Judge and Trout base card, plus a total of 3 Trout inserts (Trout is an A+ according to Baseball America, in case you were worried!) and 1 Judge insert.

Comments

2016 Topps Series 2 Break

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...

Heroes & Legends

I almost never deal with non-baseball products, and very rarely buy Panini products. However, when Blowout Cards offered a 100-pack lot of 2012 Panini Americana Heroes & Legends for just $20, I couldn’t resist. That feeling was reinforced when I told my wife what I’d purchased, and she said, “You only bought one?” Thankfully, Blowout let me amend my order, and I ended up with 200 packs of Americana to plow through. They came in 2 separate packages of 100 each, and this post will focus on the second lot of 100, because to be honest, there was nothing of note in the first 100. Keep in mind nothing is guaranteed, of course, compared to the 3 hits that are in each hobby box. But for $20... You ever go yard sale shopping late on a Saturday morning? You know you’ve missed out on the best stuff, but you stop at the sparse-looking, meager yard sales hoping that you may come across that diamond in the rough that somehow everyone else missed. ...

First things first

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...

Penny Sleeve Preacher

Search This Blog