i checked out my cards: baby jays

This is what I have been staring at since Thursday afternoon. With the Nor'easter spinning off the Atlantic Coast, a bunch of veeeeery cold air north of the Great Lakes was pulled down from Canada, resulting in about sixty straight hours of lake-effect snow locally. 

So on Friday I worked for home (for real!) and watched the snow blanket the area, and once my tasks were accomplished I took sorting more of my recent COMC Black Friday order. Previous entries can be seen here, here and here.

For this installment, we'll take a look at some Baby Blues.

You won't see any of Toronto's No. 1 prospect Vladimir Guerrero Jr. here, but Bo Bichette, another son of a 1990s star is no slouch, leading us off in his Bowman Scout's Top 100 above.

Sticking with bloodlines, I also picked up some sky-blue refractors from this 2016 Bowman. The sky blues look great with Blue Jays on them.

Reese McGuire, surprisingly, doesn't have a dad that's an ex-All-Star. Still, he's a legit catching prospect that came to the Blue Jays last summer when the Jays traded Drew Hutchison to the Pittsburgh Pirate in a very lopsided trade.

Leaf 2013 brought back some memories of the very early 1990s, and boy does this card lend itself to a nice inking.

As does 2014 Bowman Inception:

This year wasn't my favorite as far as Inception goes, but 2016 was tremendous with the celestial theming. Unfortunately, the plain gray swatch relic comes with an unsatisfying sticker autograph.

Still, that's a pretty fantastic-looking card.

Sean Reid-Foley had a strong debut in 2014 and was solid in 2015, but he hasn't progressed past Double-A yet in 2017.  The recent slowing of his progress and rank loss in the Blue Jays top prospects list means his secondary card values have dropped as well.

The same goes for Conner Greene, who also struggled with Double-A New Hampshire this season.

I've got a purple one of these somewhere, too, and a base green "paper" parallel. Greene throws a hundred but like many others that do, has trouble placing it. He's also buds with Charlie Sheen, which, well, take that as you will.

Bringing back this design of Bowman's Best in 2016 was a great idea. See? Topps can still swing it sometimes, even if they're just rehashing old sets and an insert.

Another reminder to watch your COMC inventory closely: I ended up with two of these. And the same with this one:

Alford led me to pick up another sky-blue refractor from 2016 Bowman, and with Biggio and Alford already, I might as well see what other Jays from 2016 Bowman I can grab. 

Unlike some of the Jays pitchers, Alford had a real strong 2017, earning a call-up this summer before breaking the hamate bone in his wrist and finishing the season at Triple-A. He played in the Mexican League this winter and did extremely well.

From A...to Zeuch. TJ Zeuch was Toronto's first-rounder in 2016, and as a bit of a safe pick, he had a great debut season in 2017. 

Beyond leading the Blue Jays pitching prospects in 2017, he's also a leader in the chase for the most pitchery of pitcher faces as well.

Finally, we'll end with Max Pentecost, the Jays' top hitting catching prospect. Pentecost has been kicking around the org since 2014, battling various shoulder injuries. One of his first cards was this 2014 Bowman Sterling autograph on a sticker:

And yes, it's that hideous in person. But us prospectors have to prospect.

Of course, as bad as this Sterling auto looks, the following is the opposite. 

No sticker, no terrible photoshopping, no chrome board - well, no board at all. This "card" feels almost like a piece of glass, but is definitely a solid plastic from 2014 Leaf Trinity, and hand-numbered at just 23/25.

It's thick, around 1/8", crystal clear, and the blue is beautiful.

To give y'all a better look, here's a photo rather than a scan, coincidentally with some stats of Pentecost's that I was using to write up a post over at Jays From the Couch.

Hopefully that gives a better idea of of the Pure inserts from Leaf Trinity. If you've got a favorite player int he set, I recommend grabbing one of these.

november nue jays (pre-comc binge)

The weather is cooling, and the singles from ebay keep trickling in. I've been more busy and avoiding retail strores as much as possible, so there hasn't been any ripping to speak of since the Topps Fire hate rip and the Heritage Minors, but there's always something interesting worth discussing, as long as I can find some images to keep the attention.

First up is the Stroman above, which, I didn't think I could hate a Marcus Stroman card...but there it is. I am yet to find a redeeming quality to 2017 Topps. I truly believe it's the worst flagship they've ever put out.

While I don't like Gypsy Queen so much either, the Glassworks box toppers from 2017 caught my attention, and Marcus was the lone Blue Jay from the checklist.

This monster is a 3x5" on a refractor board. It's a great-looking card, but on the back there is the token Topps "Congratulations" spiel. Stop congratulating me for buying your product, you pompous assbutts.

Keeping with Blue Jays pitchers, I've started working on a PC of TJ Zeuch, their first rounder from the 2016 draft.

This insert from Bowman Chrome basically just features where the player was originally drafted and where they were drafted and signed. In 2013 Zeuch went 924th overall, but in 2016, he was a first-rounder at 21st. It's a fair enough concept for a card and fits the Bowman brand. The colors in this insert are also unique, so it was an easy purchase.

He also wrote his name on it for some reason.

From Z to A.

I think this came out of 2017 Topps, possibly making it the only redeeming quality of this year's "effort." For the record, 1987 Topps was seven years old by the time Anthony Alford was born in Columbia, Mississippi in 1994, and Major League Baseball went on stike less than thirty days later.

To another A, Rick Ankiel. I have a low-key Ankiel collection, along with other players that were huge prospects at the time but along the way something went wrong, and their cardboard is now virtually worthless.

That's pretty much how I came into finally owning a Pacific Cramer's Choice card. This one is from 2000 or 2001 though, so it's not one of the originals with a gem-like appearance.

Still big, though:

I used a 2017 Bowman's Best of Anthony Alford, also autographed, to show off the size. The seller was kind enough to include a top loader, but I don't think soft sleeves exist for cards this big. Man, it's loud.

I've also been going though a bit of a 2017 Bowman High Tek binge now that the price has plummeted. High Tek offers awful reward for your money for breakers, and I'm taking advantage of that through ebay, pumping up my Lourdes Gurriel, Jr. collection.

Here's the base (left) and the autograph (right.)

Upon closer inspection, the autographed one is a diffractor, but since it's unnumbered, it fell through the cracks as a base auto for around the price of a pack of Gypsy Queen. Add another parallel to the pile.

Not to be confused, of course, with this Tidal Diffractor, which is numbered out of /199:

Right. So all of those look pretty much the same, but the final one has the "Tidal" pattern, which looks more like a simplified hurricane or whirlpool. I may further expunge upon this in the future, using photographs instead of scans.

Tek autos are reasonably priced on the secondary, as long as you don't go too hard into the parallels. Somehow, I managed to pick up the Bo Bichette (base) in a lot for an extremely reasonable price along with Sean Newcomb, Anderson Espinoza and Jorge Mateo (Tidal Diffractor.)

As November churned on, I finished out the Black Friday-Cyber Monday weekend with a few more additions. It only resulted in one auction that put cards in my hand before the end of the month, though, and that was these:

So, Topps Gallery is a thing again, but it doesn't' have to be. Especially when you're just putting shitty instagram filters on Getty Images. Want to resurrect a great Topps set? Bring back the original Topps Stars.

With that being said, I'm done with 2017 Topps Gallery.

But let's not end on that negative (though I do like the Alfords.)

You may have noticed the scans of the Bowman High Tek are...bad. I experimented with a couple methods, such as directly on the glass (above) and on top of a small snapcase. The answer to a good-looking Tek scan? Put it right in the snapcase and put it on the glass:

And there you have it, a 2017 Bowman High Tek Bo Bichette diffractor (/199) in all of it's holographic glory.

Stay hard, friends.

drinkin' & rippin': 2017 topps heritage minors

Tuesday the 24th was a long day. Some travel, meetings, a webinar, an more travel. After returning from beautiful Avon, NY - gassing up the rental and jamming the key into the drop box, I returned home to find a svelte cardboard box on the table from Dave & Adam's Card World. Inside were two boxes of 2017 Topps Heritage Minors and some free hockey packs.

I haven't bought boxes since about 2013 or so, again with a Topps minors product in Pro Debut. Then, I did well. This time, well...let's see.

Drinkin' and Rippin' is a simple concept. A boy, a beer and a box of cards. In this case, two hobby boxes of 2017 Heritage Minor Leagues. The beer in this case is from Thin Man Brewery in the Elmwood area of Buffalo and is the double-dry-hopped version of their Very Friendly IPA. It's fucking great.

On to the cards.

My goals were simple: a few Blue Jays, some hot prospects, and some Yankees to flip. If we can't avoid all of the Yankees seeded into today's product, we might as well profit.

It started off as expected, with plenty of Yankees to be had. I think they made up at least 10% of the base set and closer to 15% of the inserts. This is a lot easier to disguise in minor league sets where all levels of the minors cloak the pinstripes.

Each box contains a relic and an autograph, and Box 1 was a dud in that regards. The following are two of the lesser impressive or impactful available.

The Jorge Mateo (a Yankee, of course) was the first "hit" to come out of the packs, and man. I wasn't ready for this kind of disappointment. The cards are absurdly thick for not being patches, resulting in packs of just three cards. At least Mateo is a good player, and a fast one at that: he stole 234 bases in 452 minor league games so far, and he's just 22 years old.

Next up came the auto, from Jacob Heyward. I had to look him up, which isn't a good sign. The Giants' LF prospect had a pretty mediocre season in 2017 at A-Ball.

The autos take the look of the base card, but come backwards in the pack as they're potentially hard to spot. With Heyward signing blue on a white jersey, it wasn't difficult in this case.

Here's a short print of Twins' middle infielder Nick Gordon. This one shows just how pretty these cards can be in their 1968 glory. There was another significant SP in these boxes, but this one was a football player in a baseball set for some reason:

Baseball America All-Stars fan 1:6 packs, so I was hoping for six, and received six.

These are really excellent, bringing the scouting and prospecting aspect to the hobby without having shlubby Bowman scouts signing sticker autos. I was very lucky to pull Blue Jays' top prospect Vladimir Guerrero Jr. and future impact OF Ronald Acuna of the Atlanta Braves organization. Vlad Jr. cards are already looking extremely collectible.

Speaking of Blue Jays, there were plenty in Heritage Minor Leagues, a 250-card set.

Again, Guerrero is looking awesome. Redi-Foley...might be considering his next murder. The Rios is a total dud. But there's more:

We get ROWDY and Urena in the next batch, along with a J.B. Woodman. Urena was solid in his limited MLB debut in 2017, but Tellez was disappointing with Triple-A Buffalo.

Another future Blue Jay falls from the 1:5 Topps Discs insert, this time Bo Bichette, who won a MiLBY award for Offensive Player of the Year. When I say falls, I mean it literally. If you're not paying close enough attention, when you pull the deck of cards out of the pack, the discs fall out freely. There were also some mascots involved in this set, but I couldn't care less about those.

Of course, with it being a Topps release, there were plenty of parallels:

Blues fall 1:17 and are numbered to /99.
Greens fall 1:33 and are numbered to /50.
Grays fall 1:66 and are numbered to /25.

None of the above are particularly interesting and they'll probably end up on ebay.

On to the good stuff. This box treated me well with the second memorabilia card, as I added ex-Blue Jay and current Oakland Athletic Franklin Barreto to my collection.

plain gray swatch

After that, though, a case hit:

You might be thinking, "Hey, that's just a base card." And you would be right, but in this case Topps has dropped Arozarena's first name on this card (it's Randy, by the way) and printed them at a scant enough amount for them to be inserted at 1:714. This one already sold on ebay, but there's not much demand for this listless variation.

While the Arozarena pull was a good one, it paled in comparison to the autograph in box two. Prior to this one, I was a little disappointed.

Looks familiar, right? It's the first card in this post, but it's also a photoshopped and autographed version of it, featuring one of the game's elite prospects in Eloy Jimenez. While not rare, this is a huge pull for the player alone.

Heritage Minors 2017 was a good break, but most of it's allure comes from very rare parallels and the potential of guys like Eloy Jimenez, Vladimir Guerrero Jr. and Gleyber Torres. It's affordable at just $52/box, and the reward can be either significant or non-existent. It's a bit of a roulette, nut fun nonetheless.