Returning from Coors and opening some Stadium Club

Late last night, I returned home from Denver. I had a good trip, taking in the HR Derby, MLB All-Star Game, and everything in between. It was a busy few days, but I was happy to return home. I'm too old to gallivanting around a city during the work week.

A couple observations:

• Literally don't care if it's BP. Guys hitting the ball 500 feet is awesome to see. It doesn't make sense seeing a ball go that far from where it started, even if it started 30 feet from him and was being thrown 40 MPH by an old guy.
• The new HR Derby format is much better than any of the old formats. I hope it stays for a while and MLB doesn't tinker.
• Coors Field has horrible concessions and had no idea how to handle a full capacity crowd. Their urinals are also small and close together.
• MLB doesn't care if you don't like the jerseys. At all. A LOT of people were wearing them and spent good money on them. They were the most common piece of game merchandise for the thousands of people walking around. Your Twitter complaint means nothing. And no, I didn't buy one. I got my son a hat and my daughter a stuffed bear.
• Once the game started, the jerseys were easy to forget about. Blue was away. White was home. Baseball was being played, despite what someone was wearing. It felt normal, especially because the AL once again won.

Moving on. One benefit to returning home - you know, besides seeing my wife and kids - is that my two blaster boxes of Stadium Club were waiting for me. It was super easy to order them from Target.com. I don't mind ordering cards to open online at all. Saves me the trip of going to the store.

I actually crushed it with Yankees. My two boxes were packed from them, from inserts to base cards to parallels to special box toppers.

I don't have much to say about Stadium Club. They are excellent looking cards with a minimalist design and exciting photos. Although some of the photos are a bit dull featuring just running or swinging, they still look sharp and crisp.

The horizontal cards are my favorite, and I would be fine if the whole set was like these. They all seemed a bit more interesting than the verticals.

And of course, there's always a mixture of legends.

As for the aforementioned Yankees, it felt like every pack I opened had a card from my favorite team. The rarest was a Giancarlo Stanton Red Triumvirate, which fall 1:192. Not bad. What's disappointing about these is how flat they are. They need some color, shine, or texture!

Beyond that, three inserts I was lucky enough to get were Superstar Duos of Aaron Judge and Stanton, a reprint of Mariano Rivera, and a Virtual Reality of Luke Voit. According to the fancy metrics on the back, over 162 games Voit would have hit 59 homers. Sure.

Here are a few more Yanks base cards. I like the Mattingly quite a bit. I received THREE base card of Clint Frazier. And then also got a black parallel of Urhsela, but not showing it. Just imagine what it looks like with a black logo.

Speaking of parallels, I got several. I don't really get the point of just changing the foil color, but there they are.

The rarest card I got was a 30th Anniversary parallel of Kenta Maeda, a 1:318 pull! Always sad when you beat the odds and pull a dud. That's a Napkin Doon quote.

Here's a few more fancy cards.

Last but not least, each blaster comes with a loose Master Photo. I didn't even know this before purchasing, so that was cool to get them. I did well with a Bellinger and a Deivi Garcia RC,

I don't regret the $40 I spend on these at all. They were fun to open, and should provide me with some great fodder for TCDB. 

Oh, and go AL.