Repack remorse

A few days ago, the wifey and baby and I hit up Target. I decided to treat myself to some cards. I was hoping for either a Bowman or Archives blaster, but they had neither. Boo. I settled on a few of those repack boxes, figuring I could get 10-14 packs and still spend less than I had budgeted. Plus, I always read about nice scores from a lot of bloggers from repacks.

Well, these sucked. I was so disappointed. Most of the packs were from 2010-2012 Topps, which is fine, but we’ve all had our fill of those. I was hoping for a few more mid-00s Upper Deck or Fleer Ultra packs.

I still busted the packs of course, but really got nothing interesting. I won’t lie, here are the three best cards I got:

Do you ever buy a repack box, and then immediately regret it?

TTM recap - 2012 Spring Training

This spring, I sent 41 TTM requests out. I received successes from 17 of them. I also received one failure (a card returned unsigned). Therefore, 23 went unanswered. Now, I will never write any of these off. They could still trickle in, but for the most part, it looks like I batted a little under .500 this spring. I know that’s part of the game, so I’m not upset. A few players were reaches and I knew that going in.

Here are my successes from 2012 Spring Training:

Ackley, Dustin

Adams, David

Brackman, Andrew

Higashioka, Kyle

Kuroda, Kiroki

Laird, Brandon

Martinez, Tino

Melancon, Mark

Nix, Jayson

Noesi, Hector

Pendleton, Lance

Rivera, Mariano

Romine, Austin

Soriano, Rafael

Stoneburner, Graham

Taillon, Jameson

Warren, Adam

TTM Success: Dustin Ackley

While most of my TTM collection is Yankee-centric, I do send to players from other teams from time to time. A lot of times I’ll send to young players who I think have a bright future, trying to get their auto before they blow up too much. Here is one instance.

Dustin Ackley signed this 2011 Topps Update in just over a week c/o Mariners Spring Training. As he has done all spring, her personalized the auto, which I assume is to prevent some people from selling it. It doesn’t bother me one bit since it’s for my collection. The day it arrived, I pulled a 2012 Heritage base card of Ackley, and immediately I wished that I had it in time and that was the card I sent to get signed. Oh well.

Ackley has a really bright future a 2B for the Mariners. He is part of an exciting young offense, and once Ichiro retires, I think he’ll be the leader of the Mariners for years to come.