Swag from Play at the Plate - 2010 Topps Chrome - Including an Orange HOF

Play at the Plate ran one of my favorite kinds of contests - A random Winner Contest! Those happen to be the kind I am best at - and guess who won!

The Prize in the PATP contest was a 2010 Topps Chrome Value Pack. Seen a lot of these around the blogs and it was fun to open my own pack.

I was hoping for a cool Rangers card to send back PATPs way but unfortunately came up empty - The 3 packs plus Orange Pack also lacked Phils but were fun to open. Here are the Highlights:


Refractor - Orange

Mickey Mantle
Delmon Young
Carlos Quentin

As with other Topps Products the Mantle is card #7 in 2010 Chrome. Jury is out on the Orange - cool idea having basically an extra parallel pack of cards in with a 3 pack retail product. Kind of weird - I think of Chrome as a parallel set to begin with and they just keep adding parallels to it.

Inserts

Refractor Erick Aybar - I think these used to be X-Fractor's but the card sez Refractor
Refractor - Purple Mike McCoy (#d 237/599)

I think the Purples are 1:12 so those come at about 3/box in retail. Aybar is one of those steady Middle Infielders that none of us folks on the East Coast no anything about. Mike McCoy is a career minor league player who finally broke into the majors in 2009 at the age of 28.

Highlights


Jake Peavy
Chris Heisey
Shin-Soo Choo
Cliff Lee

Chris Heisey is an intriguing player to me - I went to school with a group of brothers named Heisey that were all very good athletes. From his Bio have determined that Chris Heisey went to college very close to my hometown. Have not tracked down weather he is related or not, but I am following the talented prospect.

And of course after Monday Night's performance what Phillies post featuring cards from a Rangers fan would not be complete without mentioning Mr Cliff Lee.

Thanks to Brian over at PATP and hope this gets the Rangers some Mojo 2nite as they face the Yanks.

Pretty Cool Mailing - Holliday Peavy Pujols and a newsboy

Has anybody ever received cards from an ebay seller in an envelope this cool???



I mean check it out - First off you've got baseball stamps of Albert Pujols, Matt Holliday, Jake Peavy and some guy on the DL - side note: the Children of Malawi are a charity of Cole Hamels and wife Heidi. There is Ethel Merman, Walt Disney, and Henry David Thoreau - The thing looks like this years Allen & Ginter checklist. But wait it gets better - check out the B-side.


Thats the Pope, Michael Jack, and Garry Maddox - all used to seal the envelope. I mean where the heck are you ever going to find a sticker of Paul Owens??? And this wasn't even for an auction of Phillies cards.

2009 Upper Deck Faux Blaster

On Saturday we showed the results of a fake blaster of 09 Topps by posting $20 worth of packs purchased at a recent card show. At the same show I picked up $20 worth of UD Packs. Here are the results.

2009 Fake UD Hobby Blaster
Configuration 4 Hobby Packs + a Bonus for $20.00

72/500 Base 14.4% - each pack contained 18 base cards regardless of the number or type of inserts. No Dupes. 2 Phillies #291 Chase Utley and #298 Brad Lidge above


1 Game Jersey Dual Swatch GJ-JV Jason Varitek #d 033/149
1 Rivals R9 Angels v Dodgers Vlad v Manny.


2 USA Baseball 18U-JM Jeff Malm, 18U-MS Max Stassi.
1 Stars of the Game GG BW Brandon Webb

I am with Chris from Stale Gum here, having minors on cards is a little weird, although Stassi the younger of the two players will be 18 in a couple of weeks.

2 Documentary 4925, 4926 - BOS ALCS5 and BOS ALCS6 Both Ws for the BoSox as they tried to mount a series comeback versus the Rays.
1 UD 20th Anniversary Retrospective #130 Randy Johson 130Ks in 160.2. Seems like an unremarkable stat, but if your looking to fill cards there it is.
1 YSL 6741 - Derek Jeter 9/20/2008 Yanks 1 O's 0. This was the next to last game at Yankee stadium. Jeter is picture on a card for a game where he was removed for a pinch runner. weak.

This Hobby Blaster came out to be about even with a retail blaster. Retail blasters have 10 packs of 8 roughly I think. These Hobby cards are 4x20. Retail guarantees one relic, which I also got in the Hobby packs. In comparison with the Retail Blaster opened over at Stale Gum the other inserts are about equal - I like the Documentary add on better than the regular Documentary simply because they are all playoff games. My biggest insert disappointment was not gettting a 75 OPC.

To me the 09 UD v Topps competition is a tie. Topps has narrowed the gap in photography and both companies have put out functional if not distinct designs. My knock on the Topps cards is the miniscule unreadable card numbers. My complaint on UD is all the wasted space used to name the players position. This is really poor on the landscape style cards.

2009 UD #312 Jake Peavy

Neither Topps nor UD came up with an insert set that I am interested in collecting, although I may work on the 75 OPCs.

%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%

ok now for the bonus.

I got the dealer to toss in grab bag (box really) with the 4 packs. The front card was a 2008 Donruss Threads Bob Gibson, which is a set I am thinking about building, as I have picked up quite a few packs of it already. I wasn't expecting much from the grab bag as he sells them for 1.75 normally and he was happy to throw it in.

The 75 card box actually turned out to be pretty good.

3 Phillies (Dykstra, Dale Murphy, Gene Shall)
8 Moments and Milestones - How bout that These baby's are so worthless they are getting thrown in grab bags
6 08 Allen Ginter Plus 2 flags
20 cards of Hall of Famers mostly from the overprinted glory years
30 stars and notables also from those operprinted glory years
and about dozen cars that are absolutely worthless.

1987 Topps #312 Turn back the Clock Reggie Jackson
2008 Topps #122 Jeff Kent 42 RBI (of 125) #d 006/150

So in the end, the Faux Hobby Blaster was a bit better than a Retail Blaster would have been on the grab bag. There was enough decent stuff in those 75 extra cards for me to consider them worthwhile.