Busting a 2020 Topps Chrome Blaster

Yesterday I had to take my car in for service, and afterwords I was planning to grab some groceries. While I was waiting at the auto shop, I chugged down my morning coffee, while drinking a whole bottle of water. The coffee ran right through me and I was hit with the need for a restroom before grocery shopping. I was passing a Target, so I decided to pop in to use the facilities... and take a quick stroll down the card aisle. 

I live in a metropolitan area, and there are probably five or so Targets within 20 miles of me. All of them are almost always dry on retail products, although I've had some luck at this particular store before. Upon arriving in the card aisle, I was met with one of my collecting fears: It appears that the card aisle is being phased out. The amount of self space that was reserved for sports cards was smaller than usual. Pokemon cards and Magic the Gathering cards encroached on the left side. Toys crept in on the right side. 

I've read some rumors on hobby-Twitter that claim retail stores are going to stop stocking cards, primarily because the product is becoming more hassle than it's worth. Flippers clearing shelves, grown men acting like children, phony returns, etc. I'm not sure if there's any truth to these claims, but I will say, it does appear that my two go-to Targets are phasing out cards. The display spaces have shrunk in the past few weeks and have been replaced with non-sports cards and tchotchke toys. 

Depsite all of that bad news, I was very fortunate to find a Topps Chrome blaster yesterday. I swear - when you go to the store to specifically look for cards, you don't find them. If you pop in for a different reason and swing through the card aisle, you'll strike gold. I hope this isn't the last time I'll be able to buy baseball cards at a retail store like Target, but I fear it may be my going-away present. Time will tell.

On to the cards...

Here's a look at the base cards. I was pretty indifferent about the 2020 flagship design but I think it translates really well to chrome. Chrome does a good job of blurring the background and putting a singular focus on the player, and they look great in hand.

Dustin May definitely has some great hair. It kind of reminds me of Pennywise the clown... and that freaks me the hell out. His young career if off to a great start this year.

I pulled three refractors, one of which is a prism refractor. Happy to see two rookies here, which will be stashed away. Civale will have plenty of opportunity to prove himself as a solid starter - you have to think that the Clevinger trade shows some confidence in him to step up. 

A cool Bo Bichette rookie.

My guy! This is the only Pirate I pulled but I couldn't have asked for better. This card was on my wantlist, and I plan to target some of the parallels of this card for the PC. 

When I felt my finger fall into the gap of a die-cut, I was surprised. I didn't know that Chrome had any die-cuts in it this year. This is a pretty goofy and unneeded card in my opinion. 1950's wool jerseys don't exactly blend well with the modern "X" die cut design.

A nice pair of 1985 inserts. 

We finish up with the sepia refractors. You'll find a pack containing four of these cards in a blaster, making them retail-exclusive. I'm not crazy about sepia parallels. They're... fine, however I like the look of this year's sepia parallels over past years. In older releases, sepia cards were short printed, I believe to 75. 

There you have it! All around a very successful and fun break. Aside from ripping a few packs of Series 2 and a few packs of Bowman, it's been a slow year for ripping packs so this felt really good. 

Thanks for stopping by.

Ripping Some 2020 Bowman

I like to get a taste of most new baseball product releases. For the products I really like - Topps Chrome and Bowman Chrome - I usually pick up a hobby box. When it comes to the next tier of products, I usually stop by my LCS and grab a few hobby packs. That's been my approach with Bowman for the last few years. Of course, things are a bit different this year. I hit a few Targets last week and was unable to find any Bowman on the shelves. I checked eBay and the 200% or greater markups were just too much for me. 

Browsing the Twitter universe the next day, I came across a user who buys and sells through Twitter who was selling some unopened Bowman for a very fair price. Since I was making a small bulk purchase, I was able to negotiate with him and got the price down a bit more. When it was said and done, I ended up paying $25 over MSRP for a lot of three value packs and four "fat packs." It was far better than what I would have paid on eBay.

Each value pack will give you 24 cards plus 5 camo parallels and the fat packs have 19 cards, so I was looking at 163 cards total. 

Starting out with the Buccos: I pulled six Pirates cards total with only one dupe. Lots of familiar faces here. I didn't realize Oneil cruz had an insert in this set until I pulled it out of the pack which was a neat little surprise.

Here's my "probably headed to eBay" group:

The prize of Bowman 2020 is Jasson Dominguez, the 17-year-old outfield prospect that signed with the Yankees in 2018 out of the international prospect pool and earned himself a cool $5 mil. He's the top prospect in the Yankees system and one of the top prospects in all of baseball... but, ya know... he's 17... and the odds are better that he'll flame out than be a star. That's true of all MLB prospects, but the hype around this kid's baseball card is pretty wild. It's going for $25 on eBay and the price is too juicy not to take in order to recoup some cost.

Curiously, I pulled exactly two copies of each of the top rookies in the set. The hype is real around all four of these guys. The one that jumps out to me the most is Gavin Lux because his name was floated for a week last June as a trade candidate for Felipe Vasquez. At the time Vasquez was one of the most dominant closers in baseball and would have made sense for any contender. The rumor was that Pirates were asking for Lux but he was the one player that was untouchable, per the Dodgers. The deal fell apart from there (so did Vasquez's career and probably the rest of his life as he's currently in jail facing 24 felonies. Ah, the Pirates).

These cards will be stashed away until one of them becomes the 2011 Topps Update Mike Trout Rookie. That's how it works, right?