The Joy of Repacks

I went to Target this past weekend.  What started as a quick trip to get a picture frame turned into 7 texts from my wife asking for things that she needed from the grocery store (thankfully it's a Super-Target, so it was one-stop shopping).  Of course I meandered over to the baseball card aisle when I had completed the random scavenging through the store -- I mean, how often do you get to buy coffee, raspberries, Orajel, and candles in one trip?

My local Target has all the cards you would have expected to see.  Packs of Base set, Opening Day, blasters of Heritage, Gypsy Queen, whatever no-logo-allowed effort Panini has out -- all of them were there, as were so many leftover football and basketball packs that I almost thought about buying them just to clear shelf space.

Instead, I found myself drawn in once again to the Fairfield repacks.  I don't know what it is, but I just enjoy the randomness, the weirdness, the junkiness, even the crappiness at times.  I snarfed up all five of the "100 cards plus an unopened pack" packages at $3.99 a piece and grabbed one of those "$19.99 for 10 unopened packs plus a hit" boxes.

I'm a sucker, I know, but these repacks came through again.

Let's start with the hit...well, I would, but I may have already mailed that off to someone.  So, if you happen to receive an All-Star relic of Hisashi Iwakuma, well, that's where I got it.

Actually, it was odd -- the repacks had a distinct Japanese flavor this time:

The Igawa and the Dice-K were pretty interesting to me -- they appear to have been giveaways at the National Convention to VIPs.

Once the repack returned stateside, the aura went very much more local...

Lots of Murphy and a drunk Chipper....just like you'd expect.

At this point, though, things got very real in these repacks.  By real, I mean, "producing some pretty cool stuff."

New to me were the fact that each of the 5 repacks had 1987 O-Pee-Chee inside!  Even a couple of Hall of Famers:

The top of the Carlton has that strange line at the top of it, but the Eck looks positively ready to be graded.

Add to that this 1990 Score Update set card:

Big Frank in Orange?  I mean, Orange is the new Black (much more flattering to miscuts, I'd say, but that's just my opinion), but to get this card in a repack was still a little surprising.

Last group of two, coming up:  these came out of the unopened update packs on the back of the repack:

Am I right in saying that the Trout is actually another of Topps's random short-prints?

Anyway, it was nice to get good cards cheap, as always.  I think I just am a treasure hunter at heart.  I want to find that diamond in the rough, that buried pirate's gold.  Digging in packs of cards gives me that thrill of the hunt at a very low cost.  It's why I'll always pick up a repack if one is available.  I like that chase.