Same stuff, different day

 It seems like while waiting for the final baseball card products to hit the shelves in retail stores that the same products are being stocked at Wal-Mart, Target, and the like. For me, it generally means ‘23 Allen & Ginter, ‘23 Topps Chrome, and discounted blasters of ‘22 Bowman Platinum, ‘22 Topps Heritage High Number, and ‘22 Topps Gallery. With the itch to open packs being great sometimes, that means that I’ve opened some of the same products multiple times recently. Since I don’t really care for Ginter, I’ve opened a good amount of ‘22 Heritage High Number, and don’t think there will be many Rays or Tigers in ‘22 Gallery, that means you’ve been getting many posts about ‘22 Bowman Platinum and ‘23 Topps Chrome. And you’ll be getting more today….

We recently made 2 trips to Wally World, and I picked up blasters of both of them. While not earth shattering, I think each blaster delivered in different ways. Let’s start with the ‘22 Bowman Platinum. 

A few of the base cards have already been pulled in previous blasters, but I won’t know for sure until I put these in my monster boxes of cards to be put in binders. 

Where this box really hit for me was the Rays and Tigers. Shane Baz will be back for 2024, and there’s still hope for him to become the ace that he was becoming in 2022. His card could come in handy then. I feel Brujan is just going to be a bench guy bouncing from team to team, and the last guy may not be in MLB much longer. Should the worst happen, I’m probably not going to go out of the way to acquire his cards, but if they come to me via trades I probably won’t pitch them. Yankee fans still accept cards of John Wetteland, Mel Hall, and Chad Curtis, right?  Not that the Rays have much room to talk. I think when the final verdict comes out on Franco, I’m going to do a post about the Rays and some of the questionable players they have employed and ask the question why. 

Back to the cards, the Torkelson and Jobe cards are nice ones that will go to my rookie card binders since I already have copies for my Tiger ones. I also pulled nice rookies of CJ Abrams, annoying Phillie Brandon Marsh and his teammate Bryson Stott. I was hoping Marsh would be able to afford a beard cut and haircut with the NL Champion prize money, but I guess not. Only 4 Ice Parallels and no numbered parallels today, but it was an ‘A’ last name hot box with Alonso, Alvarez, and Aguilar being 3 last names of the 4 that I pulled. 

The Chrome box was less of a box that catered to my collection needs, but it still had some good cards. I only got 2 Rat-Bird cards out of the blasters, but their Game 1 loss and 9-2 score presently in the top of the 4th makes that all better. Won’t make the Rays loss better, but if the AL playoffs go the way they have this round, I’d be fine. I’d love to see the Rangers, Astros, Braves, and Diamondbacks advance with the Rangers winning it all, but mark my words, the Rangers, Astros, Braves and Dodgers will advance with the Braves beating the Astros 4 games to 2. It would be nice to see new blood win it all, and everyone besides Texas has won a title, and all but Arizona, Philly, Baltimore, Minnesota, and Texas have won in the past 3 seasons. With Philly, Baltimore, and LA on my crap list for beating Tampa in the World Series or this year’s playoffs, and Minnesota being on it for being a thorn in Detroit’s side, it doesn’t leave too many teams to root for even if I don’t care about having a new team winning. 

No really big name rookies, although Bello seems like he could be good for Boston and I like Montero for Arizona. Grissom could be a fixture for Atlanta, although he disappointed this season. Alvarez also seems like he is a nice hitter for New York, so his might be a good pull as well. The refractors were generally a disappointment, with an unknown rookie for the A’s, a sepia refractor of Michael Massey that is somehow a double after only 3 blasters (!!!), a Tatis (Padre$ suck!), and a Twin. The pink ones are fine with me. I was really hoping Seattle would get in the playoffs this year, and they would’ve been my dark horse to win it all this year. They’ll be in it the next few years. Raleigh looks like he’ll be a nice catcher for them. Marte wasn’t a bad pull either, just never been a fan/hater of either the Mets or Marte, but I’ll take it over a Yankee/Padre/Rat-Bird/Twin/Guardian any day. 

The other card that intrigues me some is the Ohtani card. I’ve busted a few Chrome blasters the last 2 years, but haven’t pulled any guys for the MVP promotion, but Ohtani might have a chance to win the award this year. Maybe Seager has a chance or maybe one of the Rat-Bird guys, but I think only Seager has a shot at beating Ohtani, and with his dual-position and putting up those numbers in an injury shortened season, I think I have a good shot. Now I’ll have to decide whether to redeem it or keep it. Do I go after another blaster to try to get an Olson or Acuna for the NL award? 

I’m almost done with my Topps card logging. I’m halfway done with the Rangers, then just have the Jays and Yankee$, and USA and a few smaller defunct teams, which should only take a few hours total. Just a few more weeks and I should have some lists appearing on here. 

Whenever the final checklists from’23 Topps Update make their appearance, I’ll get to updating the ‘23 Topps page of my Topps missing players pages. I may be concentrating on the baseball card portion of the blog but I’m still going to do the customs. I just want to get need lists up at least so I can work on completing some physical sets. 

While I’m on the subject of customs, I got one set printed for my big project and I’m in the process of printing more, cutting them out, and I’ll mail some out to the customer this week for a small event related to the subjects. From there, we’ll see how many sets I need to make, and I’ll try to finish those soon and expect a post on the whole thing when I get clearance. 

2023 Topps Update should be out in a week or so, and while that might be a good choice to get packs of besides the 2 products I’ve been blasting lately, I plan on just purchasing a hand collated set, so buying packs probably won’t be a good idea. I figure ‘23 Heritage High Number, ‘23 Bowman Platinum, ‘23 Topps Gallery, ‘23 Mozaic, and ‘23 Archives will be out soon enough, so we might get a chance of pace finally. I’m sure some of you guys sure hope so. 

Thanks for checking out my latest post. 

-Jeremy