I Don't Care That These Are For Kids.......

The 2023 baseball cards feel a little slow. It's the middle of April and all we've got so far is Topps Series  1 and Bowman Heritage from 2 years ago. Maybe some delayed 2022 products too. Where is Topps Heritage and Bowman?  

Anyway, strep has been making its way through my house this week. I have avoided it so far, but I spent my Friday hanging out with my middle schooler who felt miserable. Lots of rest, fluids, and some amoxicillin and we are feeling better today. Still, I needed a little entertainment to keep myself going yesterday, so I picked up a few packs of Topps Big League.  

I don't care that Topps Big League is made for kids, it provided a little bit of entertainment on a long day at home with a sick kid. 

Here's what I pulled out of the packs.  

The base cards are missable, but I picked out my favorite three........  

This Molina card is actually a foil parallel, hard to tell from the scan, but it has a silver finish. I did not pull a Pujols base card, which was a little disappointing, but it's a 300 card set and I opened a Blaster box with roughly 100 cards.  

My two other favorites were former Durham Bull Blake Snell and current Durham Bull Jonathan Aranda.  

I am honestly surprised that Aranda has appeared in both 2023 Topps products. I think he's a Major League player, but he's not high up on the Rays prospect list and he is buried in Triple A at the moment.  

Can I bring up the most annoying base card?  

Topps airbrushed a bunch of the players who were traded or switched teams with free agency this offseason.  Several are really bad, but Andrew McCutchen is easily the worst. It's really obvious that the photo on this card was airbrushed.  

Remember when Andrew McCutchen was on the Pirates for 9 years at the beginning of his career? You're telling me that Topps could not have used one of those photos?  I would rather see a dated photo than one where he in on the Brewers and Topps airbrushed him into a Pirates uniform.  

The insert cards are much more kid-friendly.

We've got graffiti name tag.  

Babe Ruth and graffiti. Peanut butter and jelly.  

I did pull an Albert Pujols card. Nice looking insert.    

Yes, it's a video game reference, which seems kid-friendly, but most current kids also think 8-bit games are really lame. My fifth graders talk about NBA 2K. I talk about NBA 96. They don't care about Reggie Miller or Charles Barkley. Not truly kid-friendly. Really, this card appeals to the average Topps customer. Middle-aged, white guy who collects cards and owned a Nintendo, Sega, or PlayStation at some point between elementary school and college.  

I am more of a 16-bit guy.  

These are "Fun Box" inserts.  

These two cards made me think that this insert set was somehow an ode to ballpark food or Lunchables, Ballpark food is okay, Lunchables are gross. I ended up with a few other Fun Box cards that had different backgrounds without the food.  

These feel like leftover Topps Project 2020 or Project 70 leftover cards. The Alonso card with the cartoon is goofy, but I like the Willie Mays with the swirled colors. Might be amongst my favorite cards out of these Big League packs. I guess someone at Topps was not able to quite pull this insert set together, but something decent came out of the effort.  

There are also City Slickers inserts, which are just advertisements for the Nike City Connect jerseys, which are available now at your team's store or at Nike dot com. There are a lot of base cards with City Connect jerseys as well including several Rockies players, which is why I included C.J. Cron in the scan.  

Although, those Rockies jerseys feel like an advertisement for the Colorado DMV.  

Don't forget to renew your license plates.  

Last two cards are the best two cards.  

I love the mascot cards.  

These are just incredible cards. I don't think I have a Rally Monkey card in my collection and that Fredbird card is one of the better ones out there.  There is no Opening Day set this year, so these are going to have to tide everyone over on mascot cards for the year.  

ManuMascots

There are a few Cardinals manupatch, ring, cup cards in the first series of Topps 2014.  I managed to pick up the first of them last week with this Allen Craig patch card:

The traditional looking manupatch cards have really faded in popularity and price since Topps started putting out the ultra-thick, shiny, and sparkly Awards based manu cards last year.  I understand Topps is trying to freshen up these cards a little bit by throwing in some mascot cards this year, but I think it's just proving the point that the manupatches might be a little bit stale.  Just a bit. 

Topps put a set of mascot cards together last year in the ProDebut set and they actually turned out nicely and also put out mascot autographs in the Opening Day set last year.  While the Pro Debut cards were cool, and the mascot autographs were popular, I am not sure these are really very good cards.