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.

Luuuuuke

Recently, I realized Luke Voit was the subject in some 2019 autograph sets. Voit's a pretty awesome player and I didn't have an autograph of him, so I decided to browse to see what I could find.

One of the first cards that popped up, with a very reasonable BIN, was a 2019 Topps Gold Label framed autograph. While I wasn't sure if I wanted a framed card, I ended up pulling trigger, as I don't have any other framed cards like this in my collection. Plus, the autograph was on-card, which appealed to me.

When I finally had the card in hand, I was pleased. It looks really nice, although his signature isn't particularly good.

Still, I was happy!

As luck would have, just a few days later, I would have the chance to meet Mr. Luke Voit!

I was at the NHL All-Star Skills night in St. Louis last night, and by chance I bumped into the man himself. I wasn't expecting to see him, but then I remembered he was a St. Louis guy, so that made a little more sense.

I spoke to him for a moment, and he was as nice as could be. Introduced himself (which many athletes don't), and I told him I was a big Yankees fan, and to bring it back this year. He said he was ready to go and excited for the season. And then he said, "and hopefully we don't have to worry about cheating anymore."

Here we are! I look good.

Love it. What a pleasant dude, and enjoyed the quick chat. I'm even gladder I bought the autograph last week!

Not to be glossed over

I don't pay much attention to the Topps TBT online exclusives. Just not really in my wheelhouse. But recently, Jason of The Writer's Journey wanted to grab the 6-card release, as long as he could share the purchase with a few team collectors.

After a little but of deliberation, I decided to chip in for the Luke Voit, as I don't have many cards of him.

The card itself is pretty cool looking, based off of 1970 Topps Glossy football, which I had never heard of. The actual release had rounded corners, which would have been a cool touch, but I'm guessing Topps On-Demand couldn't do something like this quickly.

It was nice to add another card of Voit, who is now popping up in regular releases, like Heritage and Topps Series 2. At least he is a Yankee card I enjoy pulling, unlike a guy like Chapman (who is in every set and I've never seen anyone actually want to pull one of his cards), or Ellsbury, which is a joke that Topps is still including him in sets. He's not liked and hasn't played since he was a pinch runner in 2017. Enough.

Thanks to Jason for the chance to add a new, unique Voit to the collection!

The Last of the Nows

With the two Topps NOW cards recently arriving, that's likely the last of them for this season. I say "likely" because perhaps there will be one for any interesting post-season awards, like if Miguel Andujar somehow beats out Ohtani for AL ROY.

Regardless, it's two good ones, so let's see what I got.

Luuuuuuke. The first is of Yankees out-of-nowhere sensation Luke Voit. I was glad to see him get a Yankees card, although this one is a team card, so technically not of him. I also thought his Topps NOW would be his RC, but it turns out he had a card in 2017 Update with the Cardinals. Rats!

It's a great shot of him being enthusiastic after one of his many homers this past September.

The back of the card lists out all 12 players who hit 10 or more homers for the Yankees in 2018, a new MLB record.

The next Topps NOW is the first official card of Justus Sheffield as a Big Leaguer, chronicling his ML Debut. I guess it's not technically a RC because he hasn't been featured in a base set yet. What a dumb rule. This is a card of him on an MLB mound in a regular season MLB game. It should be a rookie card, especially if he's not going to make it in any 2018 products.

Regardless, it was another fun year of buying Topps Now cards. I didn't buy as many as I did in 2016 and 2017, but still came away with some good ones.