Thursday, July 15, 2021

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.

13 comments:

  1. Well, I finally know now, who won. I'm glad you enjoyed yourself and made it home safely.

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  2. "your Twitter complaint means nothing ..."

    OK, dude. I don't care if MLB doesn't pay attention to us little people who don't like the uniforms, I'm still going to say they're crap, because they are, and the people who overpay for them are fools. We supposed to bow down to MLB and Nike because they don't look at us while they're counting their money? Somebody should stand for something once in awhile.

    Really glad I didn't buy those blasters ... or watch the HR derby.

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  3. Holy cow, those blasters were perfect for you! Thanks for sharing your two boxes. I'm still seeing new-to-me photographs and I love it.

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  4. Love the design of 2021 Stadium Club! not sure I'm a fan of the inserts. And you misquoted me. What I said was "It's always sad when you beat the odds and yet life still beats you to a pulp with unmerciful fists to your face."

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    1. "Twitter Complaints" hello, I'm from the department of the redundancy department, amiright?

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  5. The Stanton card looks like he's hitting a home run in the Death Star.

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  6. Sounds like a great week. Glad you had fun at the game. And congratulations on pulling all of those Yankees for your collection.

    As for the jersey... I don't like them, but I know there are shirts that I wear that people think look ugly. In other words, you can have the ugliest clothing on the planet and someone will be willing to wear it. I just feel bad for all of those fans who paid full price for them, because I'm sure there are millions of those jerseys that went unsold that will soon be on clearance.

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  7. Really nice looking cards. Glad you pulled so many Yankees! If you got a Strawberry (if he's even in the set), can I buy him off you?

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  8. The thing that ticked me off about the uniforms is that even though they moved the game from Georgia, they still decided to use the Braves colors in the uniforms instead of the Rox. Teams only get the ASG once a generation, I might not be alive the next time the Rox get one and I want a really bad looking jersey that is purple.

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  9. Glad you had a fun time at the ASG and thanks for showing off some Stadium Club!

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