Gallery Of Reasonable Baseball Cards

I really cannot stand Wal-Mart.  There is one a mile or so from my house.  I spent ten minutes trying to think of one item that I regularly buy from that store.  I have got nothing.  The last time I went there it was only because it opens at 6 in the morning and I needed to pick something up for the science club I run at my school.

Sure, part of the dislike has to do with the fact that the card aisle is garbage, but it also smells like cat food.  Needless to say that when a retail only product comes out I have zero chance of finding any packs of whatever it is anywhere near my Wal-Mart.  I guess I could do that whole thing where I drive from Wal-Mart to Wal-Mart all over central North Carolina, but I value my time too much to go on such a venture.

I guess I "miss out" on all of the fun.

Annual Bowman craze over some prospect?  I got an Ohtani card last year.

In the past I have ended up with plenty of cards of Bryce Harper, Steven Strasburg, or whoever else has made people scour all of their local retail stores for packs of Bowman.  I will wait a few more weeks and buy a Bowman base set for a whole lot of not much compared to what they were selling for when the set first came out.  

Remember when they had the baseball cards in the Wal-Mart brand pizza?

Big shout out to the internet for a picture of a pizza box from Wal-Mart.  I question whether the food material inside of the box can even be called a pizza.  Ultimate meat pizza?  I have my doubts.  I missed the pizza card craze and I feel like I really did not miss anything.  I can buy the two Cardinals cards in the set off of COMC for less than $3.00.....

and I have never eaten a Wal-Mart brand pizza.  It's a win-win.  

Which brings me to last year's Wal-Mart exclusive......

the Topps Gallery set.  People want a little crazy about these boxes.  Two autographs for $70 at Wally World?  I decided to wait out for singles.  The former Durham Bulls players in the set were within a comfortable price range last fall.....

so I have picked up most of those cards.  Although the Rays ended up with Christian Arroyo in the Evan Longoria trade, so there is still one out there to find.  Not sure what is up with the drawing of Kiermaier's face on this card.  A little off.  

So, on to the Cardinals.  I found a copy of the Paul DeJong and Alex Reyes autographs about two months ago, which left me with two more autographs to find.  I could have bought the Luke Weaver last fall, not too bad on price for one of his cards.....

in the Gallery set.  I went ahead and picked up this card once I found the final Cardinals card that I needed to complete the team set.  I never quite understood, of all the players, why Cardinals fans went a little overboard on Magneuris Sierra.  He is a decent prospect, mainly he's just really fast....

I suspect that some of the love for Sierra came from the fact that he is something off a 1980s Cardinals team.  He's not Vince Coleman, or Willie McGee, but he might be the closest thing the Cardinals have had the last twenty-five years.  

Since he got traded to the Marlins this offseason, he will never have the chance to duplicate those players as a Cardinal.  The good news is that most of Sierra's cards have gone from outrageous to $5. Very reasonable for a player I suspect might turn into a Billy Hamilton clone, minus a step.  I was a little excited to cross off some cards that will close out some team sets.  The Gallery card was first up on my list. 

I feel like the sticker autograph is a little more noticeable on this card than on the Weaver and Kiermaier cards.  I also feel like the art work is also better.  This is my first decent Sierra autograph too.  About a year ago, I picked up a copy of a Panini autograph....

though as an unlicensed card, it is really unattractive.  Not even close to the Gallery card.  Maybe a few more Mags cards later on this summer.  

Just Disappointed

We've have all seen pictures on the internet of people sitting in the card aisle of their local Target or Wal-Mart feeling up packs of cards, sticking them on scales, or sitting on the floor shuffling through the product.  It's a sad sight to see.....

is this guy barefoot?  Ugh.

In my cozy little corner of suburban Raleigh I do occasionally dabble in the retail card aisle of my local Target store.  The Wal-Mart near my house has the worst retail card aisle in the history of retail card aisles.  My retail purchases tend to be small quantities of products that I am not going to put together as a set, or sometimes something that I am not sure about collecting so I dabble first with some retail.

My wife recently sent me to Target to run a quick errand, so after completing the shopping list I walked through the card aisle and picked up a pick of Donruss Optic.  It's a product that I am not going to buy a box of, but I like the looks of some of the cards.  If Panini were a licensed card manufacture I would probably be more willing....

So, I quickly grabbed two packs and checked out.  I went out to my car, opened the first pack, and flipped through the cards.  Pretty nice stuff.  Then I went to open the second pack and.......

I really didn't have to do much to open the pack of cards.  The top of the pack was slit open with a knife, or a razor.  I am not sure how I missed it in Target, probably in too big of hurry, but I felt completely disappointed.  

First off, I ended up getting a couple of nice Cardinals cards out of the packs.  

I pulled two Magnueris Sierra cards.  The colored parallel actually came out of the pack that was cut open, the white base card came out of the sealed pack.  I also ended up with a nice looking Yadier Molina card.....

If only Panini would only make cards of catchers wearing their catchers gear........

Which brings me back to the whole retail pack searching thing.  I know many adults who go into places like Target and Wal-Mart, pick up some retail packs randomly from the card aisle, and open them after buying them.  Sometimes they are really happy, sometimes they are not.   I once had a great blaster box of retail cards.....

I will never forget pulling this card out of a pack at the same Target store where I bought my two packs of Donruss Optic.  You know who else buys a lot of retail packs?  Kids.  I work with kids.  I have given away packs of retail baseball cards in my class.  I have had kids pull really good cards out of packs.  One of my best ever was a 2015 Jeter photo variation card.....

That's a tough pull right there and it made the kids day.  Guess what happened later that week?  Same kid walks into my room with a stack of cards that he and his mom picked up at Wal-Mart.  We sat down before school, flipped through the stack and talked about what cards he liked and what players were his favorites.

More recently, I had a students pull a Luis Gonzalez autograph out of a repack box I had bought and given the packs away.  Nice looking card numbered out of 25.....

After researching Luis Gonzalez, the student is a Yankees fan, they decided that they liked the idea of pulling an autograph, just not Luis Gonzalez.  I brought in a few Yankees autographs and swapped them out for Luis.

I have been on this soapbox before, but there are many adult collectors and not many kid collectors.  It would be nice to attract my kids into baseball card collecting, but having people pack search and wreck the chances of a kid getting a nice card out of a retail pack is reprehensible.

How much does a Luis Gonzalez autograph cost?  Not enough for grown up to sit on the floor of Target and feel up a bunch of packs of cards for an hour.  Just disappointed.

In Search of Mags

I try to make Mother's Day an easy day for my wife.  I wake early with the little ones, make breakfast, and do a bunch of chores.  This morning I emptied out the dishwasher, filled it with a few things that did not fit in at the end of the night yesterday and then I put away laundry.  Wrangling a six year old who likes to read books is not a difficult task, but keeping an eye on a nine month old who furniture surfs, climbs stairs, and get her hands on anything she is not supposed to is a little bit more difficult.

Luckily I combined the laundry and care of the nine month old....

Littlest one was amused by being in a laundry basket and I had a few minutes to sit down to type a blog post after the house looked good.  I needed the extra time because I need to dig out a card for today's post.

A few years back, when I used to write a blog post almost everyday, I used to not even try to post all of the cards that came into my collection.  I stuck with the ones that were the most interesting at the time, so plenty of cards went straight into boxes without touching my scanner.

As it turns out, what was not interesting a few years back has suddenly become interesting during the past week all thanks to a bunch of Cardinals outfielders getting hurt and the team having to call up a speedy little outfielder all the way from A-Ball by the name of Magneuris Sierra.  Here is Mags in action last weekend against the Braves.....

The 2017 Cardinals are slow and sloppy on the bases.  Their defense causes fans to check their supply of antacids or alcohol or both.   Mags is the opposite of those things.  He can catch a fly ball and then the ball back into the infield.  He can run to a base without doing something really really stupid.  Although he got picked off right after he got his first hit.....Otherwise he hasn't done anything stupid on the bases.  

Anyway, I know I picked up a Mags auto a few years back and decided to wade through the autograph box to see if my memory served me right.  I broke out one of the autograph boxes.....

and started wading through a few hundred autographs of players with S last names.  There were plenty of scrubby Cardinals along the way....

like Kevin Siegrist.  I know people like him, I don't.  I also found a cool Kyle Skipworth card too.....

who is a former Greensboro Grasshopper and guy who was drafted way too high (6th overall) considering he's playing in Double A this year almost ten years after being picked.  Then I found it.....

I know I am not really big on the Panini cards, and it's a sticker autograph, but it's not like there is another Sierra autograph out there at the moment.  I was just happy that my memory was correct and I had one of these in the collection.  Especially since these have had one of those "This guy got called up and had a few hits, so I am going to pay a whole bunch of money for one" weeks since the Cardinals called him up.  There are a few other Mags cards in my collection beyond this autograph, but that's for another day.....