2017 Stadium Club

I was able to sneak to the LCS while "getting groceries" to see what was new. The counters were all taken up with people cracking into 2017 Stadium Club boxes. I didn't see anything too great come out of them except one fat kid pulled a chrome Omar Vizquel, called it junk, and then refused to trade/sell it to me. I would have offered him a box of twinkies but he didn't want to barter. Anyway, I bought one pack of Stadium Club to be like the cool kids. $8.00!  I saw someone else post about paying 6 or 7 and thought it was kind of funny. I got taken, that's what I get. Anywho, I did pull the one card I wanted most out of the set:

Still waiting for this guy to explode.

 Here are the other two cards worth mentioning from the set:

Sickest RC ever!

I keep trading Sanchez but he probably has a better chance of being HOF than Judge being a catcher and Judge having such little time played for how old he is.

 I can't wait to get my hands on some 5X7's of this set! Also, I have been to numerous stores countless times and have yet to see ANY Bowman Platinum or Stadium Club other than at the LCS. I am awaiting a few trade packages and a bunch of packages of Tigers stuff I won in Homerun Derby and All Star Game contests on Facebook.

Card Collecting Confusion: 2016 Topps Update Blaster Box

I have talked to a lot of collectors like me who were baseball card crazy in the 80's and 90's and lost interest a little after that. Whether we found girls or other hobbies to invest out time or that baseball hit a lull that didn't interest us, many of us have found our way back to our cardboard addictions. For me, I have come back with training wheels on. When I was a serious (as serious as a 12 year old can be) collector back in the 90's I understood the hobby. In those pre-internet to pre-ebay days the Beckett was your bible and everything was black and white so it seemed. Today's cards are beautiful but annoyingly complex. Collectors in my opinion are taken advantage of by card companies with an noncollectable amount of variations. Rookie cards used to be when a guy put in enough time in the bigs, now Bowman cards throw high school kids on cards just to have the first card out of mostly never big league players. Anyway, that is way more bitching than I like to post. Check out The Lost Collector for a much better description of how us returning collectors feel.

I say all this because recently I grabbed a blaster box of 2016 Topps Update. It was marked 25% off so I bit. I was confused by a lot of the cards. Here are some pulls:

These Seager cards are of great confusion to me. One is a RC, one is not? They are from the same box, the same pack actually. What's the deal? How many Seager cards are even in this set and why?

Now Mazara who looks to be a great up and comer for Texas. Why two cards that celebrate the same thing?

Why do some RC's contain two players? So Seager gets a handful of RC variations and Dae-Ho Lee gets 1/2?

Couldn't they find a Berrios picture of him doing something else? Why make two cards almost the same and just turn one?

I thought these inserts looked sweet!

Another insert set.

A nice Gold Numbered RC

The Fire inserts are awesome but too common.

A lot of the photos rival Stadium Club.

Rainbow foil or refractor or something like that.

Awesome photo of Trumbo.

Heavy-ass medallion card.

Strange Franklin advertising card.