An Online Set? Why not.

The baseball season starts and I always have to check out the rosters for my teams to find a few projects for the season.  New players, new cards.  Old players, new cards.  All sorts of combinations of those words.  So, this post started sometime last fall when the Cardinals brought up outfielder Tommy Pham.  He's been in their system forever, just never stayed healthy.

He had a good end of the season and had a nice Postseason moment when he hit a home run against the Cubs in Game 1 of the NLDS.

and all of the Cardinals collectors lost their minds over Tommy Pham cards.  He has an autograph in the 2015 Topps set, but they are fairly expensive.  I decided to wait for the excitement over Tommy Pham to die down a little.  I went on Ebay, put a few of his cards on my watch list, and kind of ignored them for awhile.  

Prices came down a little bit on a few of his cards and I found a really cool looking Topps card of Pham that I thought looked really cool.  There was a Buy It Now and also one or two floating around in auctions.  

Pretty nice card.  I didn't know much about this card when I first started watching it, so I did a little digging and found that there was also a Stephen Piscotty card in this set.  Then I found out there were only 13 cards in the whole set.  Then I found a set for $10.  I bought them all.  They are all numbered out of 99 and are print run 99.  Pretty cool.  I guess Topps sold these sets in their online store.  Kind of cutting out the card shops there big guy....

The cards are also oversized at 5x7.  Not only are they postcard sized, but they also appear to be made out of the same material as the common postcard.  Perhaps an Office Max Brand index card.  The cards are really thin and the George Springer card has a little ding on the bottom right corner.  Here's a look at the other 12 cards...... 

2015 Bowman Base and Prospects Sets

Last week I showed off the autographs that came out of my jumbo box.  This week I am onto the base set and some parallels later in the week.  For now I am sticking with the base set......

The organization and design of the 2015 base set is pretty much the same it has been for the better part of a decade.  There is a base set with 200, the first 150 cards featuring established Major League players.  The design is what is...it looks like a Bowman set.

The backs of the cards are typical of Bowman too.  I know I do not do backs of cards often, but Bowman has a distinctive card back.   The little charts, graphs, and diagrams at the bottom (what us teacher folk call text features) have changed over the years, but the three sections of text have not.....

The back half of the base set, consisting of the last 50 cards, consist of young Major League players/Major League ready prospects.  Players like Jorge Soler, Joc Pederson, and Javier Baez make up this part of the Bowman set.  While the quantity of players in this category included in the Bowman base set has changed from year to year, they have been included in with the veterans for almost a decade now....

The Bowman packs also feature cards in the Prospects and Prospects Chrome sets.  Each of the sets is a total of 150 cards and features the same players in each set with the same card number in each of the sets.  The design for the Prospects and Prospects Chrome sets is the same as the base set, but the numbering on the backs of the cards features the BP, for Bowman Prospects, and BCP for the Chrome Prospects.  There are definitely some good players in this year's set......

This Willy Adames is in the Bowman Prospects set.  Notice the 1st Bowman logo up in the top right hand corner of the card.  I am not going to go through the Bowman Prospects set in this post and tell you everyone that I like and do not like, but I do think this set has the potential to be a pretty deep set in the long term.  There is not a Bryce Harper, Strasburg, Kris Bryant mega prospect in the set, but the number of potentially good prospects in the set is still pretty impressive.  Adames is one of the prospects in this set that I am high on.  Over the summer I will round out the set, pick up some autographs and share a few more names from this set.....

Rodon might be one of the bigger names in this set.  This is from the Bowman Chrome portion of the prospects set.  He actually is scheduled to make his first start of the year this afternoon, I am typing this on Saturday afternoon, and he is clearly going to be a contributor to the White Sox this year.  

Overall this set is everything that collectors should expect out of Bowman.  I think there is good player selection within the prospects portion of the set.  I like this set and look forward to picking up some up the rest of the cards I need to finish out the base set, prospects set, and chrome set.  Of course there will be more autographs too.  Before we leave......

Big shout out to Bowman for putting Durham Bulls pitcher, and Rays prospect Matt Andriese in the set.  He does not have a ton of cards, not the most popular prospect in the game, but the guy works hard.  Fun player to watch if you are looking for a good player to collect in this set.....