All Cracked Up, with Crackin' Wax and a Cracked Bat

Hey there, everyone. Things have gone crazy here at Hiatus Central, what with all the traveling I've done in the past month -- yes, more traveling -- and work and all that. My time for hobbies has gotten limited somewhat so I'm way behind on website maintenance here, with sorting in my office, and with blogging.

As with my last post, while I'd prefer to post about all of these great envelopes I've received separately, I'm going to combine some things into one big post.

First up: a Topps Chrome half case break with Crackin' Wax. I had the Brewers and the Twins and got really nothing of interest outside of the base cards and the typical inserts, though I did get one Joe Mauer parallel:

It's been incredibly annoying this year to watch Topps trying to pimp Orlando Arcia as a Rookie of the Year candidate. Normally, of course, I'd be okay with a Brewer getting cards in various sets, but in this case I'm not. Why? Because Topps are run by idiots who don't fact check anyone outside of New York long enough to realize that Arcia was not rookie-eligible this year.

Total morons.

Now, that case break was a total disaster. The other half of the case that CW had was opened as part of a different case break of some sort. Not having unlimited funds to buy into every case break ever, I did not participate in it. As that half-case was opened, I got to watch as three Brett Phillips autographs tumbled out. Perhaps CW and his wife felt bad about this. It seems they talked the guys at Buck City Breaks into sending two of those my way anyway:

I'm hopeful for Brett Phillips's future as a top-notch 4th outfielder/guy not stretched to play every day. He played all three OF positions in AAA this season in preparation for that role. The Brewers have great depth with their outfield prospects and current players -- Keon Broxton had a quiet 20 HR/20 SB season, for example, and he almost certainly should be traded to upgrade the rotation if the right deal can be found. Phillips has an absolute gun from the outfield and registered a through of 104 MPH from centerfield -- the hardest/fastest throw Statcast registered all season.

Thanks, Buck City Breaks, for sharing your largesse with me.

I think I'm done with case breaks, though. For what I get out of them, it simply is a better deal for me to find the team set on eBay and buy that and the inserts instead.

Shortly after that case break, I got a huge package from my pal Julie at A Cracked Bat. 

Julie sent me the first National Geographic magazine I've ever gotten in a package:

This April 1991 story on "A Season in the Minors" featured the then Double-A affiliate of the Brewers, the El Paso Diablos. As always, NatGeo had great photographs and a well-written article to go with it.

A second magazine was a Beckett Baseball Card Monthly from February 2001 featuring hot prospect Ben Sheets on the cover with his gold medal from the 2000 Olympics:

A third "new one to me" was that Julie found an old postcard of my favorite baseball stadium of my youth: the dank, beer-stained Milwaukee County Stadium.

Finally, Julie also sent me some great cards. Here's a sample:

There are not that many bloggers who are kinder than Julie when it comes to sending great packages out. There are also not that many bloggers who even own any of those Score Summit Edition cards or even those parallel Panini Prizms. And while Jonathan Broxton and Adam Lind hung around Milwaukee for a very short time, it's always much appreciated to get a card serial numbered to TEN!

Many thanks, Julie, for the great cards!

Two More Crackin' Wax Breaks

Greetings from sunny and humid Ponte Vedra, Florida. I'm attending a trade organization meeting this weekend, which will leave me with a fair amount of downtime -- it will almost be like a vacation of sorts in some respects.

Of course, I still need to dodge the local fauna.

So, as I have written about a few times here on Off Hiatus, I subscribed to the "Topps Package" with Crackin' Wax as part of the charity case break series. The last two products in the package were Topps Series 2 and Museum Collection. 

I tend to forget about Series 2 being separate from Series 1. I'm still stuck in the 1980s, when all the cards were issued at once and had 792 cards in the set and had checklists without front photos and had prospect cards and team checklists. You know -- the good old days of wild overproduction! So, getting the guaranteed team set from Series 2 from Chris was a good thing. 

As for Museum Collection, I splurged on a box of it for myself back in 2014 when I got back into collecting. I like the product in many respects, but there are problems with it too. I like the base cards -- the high quality, thicker stock with a classier looking design appeals to me. I wish it could be a standalone product with just the base cards and two or three parallels sold in packs of 6 cards for $5 or something. The problem with it is the problem with all of Topps's non-flagship sets (other than 2017 Stadium Club for some reason): the Brewers generally get ignored. 

The Brewers really got shafted by both Series 2 and Museum Collection in terms of hits this year. It was so bad that I got money back from Chris on both breaks because of the lack of chances at a Brewers hit. So what did I get?

Let's hit up some music and introduce the cards!

How about a cover of a Loverboy song that sounds like it is being played in a drainage pipe? Sure, everybody is working for the weekend. No question about it. And there's nothing like a cover artist from Saskatchewan playing it to make it awesome!

These are the rest of the base cards from Series 2 that I didn't show in the break that Peter did. It's a mixed bag. Taylor Jungmann has spent most of the year in Triple-A. Kirk Nieuwenhuis has been added to the 40-man roster twice and designated for assignment twice so far this year. Matt Garza has been as good as you'd expect a mid-30s starter in a contract year who can't stay healthy to be. 

Chase Anderson was developing into a guy who could be an ace earlier this year before straining his oblique and being put on the DL on July 1. His injury arguably was as big a turning point in the NL Central race as the Cubs getting Jose Quintana was -- he was pitching that well. Don't believe me? Check this out: in his last 7 starts before the injury, he pitched 41-2/3 innings, giving up 21 hits and 8 walks, striking out 44 and allowing 6 earned runs (1.30 ERA, 4-1 record for him, 4-3 for the team with two losses blown by the bullpen). Those are ace numbers.

Finally, we have Eric Thames, who has cooled down (as you would expect) since April. He has been okay, but his April stats have obscured a slash line of .221/.338/.450 since May 1 (14 HR, 27 RBi in 293 plate appearances). That's acceptable based on the OPS, but that is a factor in why Jesus Aguilar is getting more playing time as the season goes on.

I'm not sure if this counts as "trip hop." It's pretty relaxing, even if the guy in the video wears too much eye makeup and yells at us all the time and even if the song is called "Dummy." 

Wait, I'm not a dummy, and neither is Chris. What is going on here?

Okay, now I get it. Parallels are for dummies. Well, if there are too many parallels its makes us all feel like dummies, I guess. This one is out of 65, if I recall correctly. You'll have to forgive me for being dumb and not noting that on my scan file even though I knew I would be doing this remotely.

Maybe I am a dummy?

This song was originally written by Puerto Rican composer Rafael Hernandez Marin, who was given the name "Mr. Cumbanchero" by President John F. Kennedy. Hernandez is a hero in the Puerto Rican community. There are schools in the Bronx, Boston, and Newark named for him, as is the airport in Aguadilla, PR. 

Always good to have a little bit of upbeat music on a Thursday to get you heading in the right direction for Friday and the weekend, right?

I'm pretty sure that Topps has been stamping "buybacks" just to get rid of its inventory of 1990 Topps cards from its warehouses. Perhaps I should try to put together a 1990 Franken-team-set of Brewers from these buybacks, but I really just don't like the idea of chasing the cards. I'll take them if people want to send them, but dang...actively seeking out the 1990s? No thanks.

Also, Robert Flores is a native Houstonian and a huge wrestling fan who apparently owns a Louisville Slugger autographed by Ric Flair. 

This song strikes me as a bit uninteresting. Alexa Goldie is a Canadian artist whom some were thinking might be the next Avril Lavigne, except that these songs just weren't all that great. 

I'm not sure if anyone has picked up yet on the theme uniting the songs I've used here today. Perhaps it would help if I told you that Topher Stott is the drummer on this song for Alexa Goldie? 

Right, Chris?

In reality, I've saved the best for last. For the first time in a long time, I beat the odds in a break and got legitimately great cards for my collection:

The "Meaningful Materials" serial numbered to 50 beat the odds for me. Getting a gold parallel for Braun was nice too, but Brewers hits have been sparse this year. In fact, they have been fairly nonexistent this year in the breaks in which I've been involved. So, when I finally had the opportunity to check in on the break and see what happened with it, I was incredibly excited to find out that I got a nice serial numbered patch. 

Still, I'd rather that there be a separate product for the base cards away from all the hits -- I mean, these designs are excellent and look sharper in hand -- even if the photo cropping makes the card look miscut. 

Chris...Topher...whichever....thanks for running these breaks and enjoy the Topher music!

Hello, 2017 Bowman

It's going to be a lazy Sunday. I can feel it already. I was half awake, as usual, from about 4:30 AM until about 6:45 AM. I started drifting back to sleep, and then *boom* a huge clap of thunder rattled around outside.

I'm awake! I'm awake!

So I got up and heard the rain just pouring down on the roof. The way my brain works, this sequence of events immediately put a song into my head.

I don't even care that I've posted this video before here, even if I try not to duplicate songs. At one point, I thought about going back and cataloging all the songs I'd posted here. Then I realized I had more important things to do with my time, like pretty much everything else I could possibly do.

So, what's on tap today? It's another one of Chris's charity case breaks from Crackin' Wax:

If you're inclined, you can watch all 3+ hours of the case break right there. 

The 2017 Bowman case break excited me. The Brewers farm system is one of the best, and (for a change) the Brewers were reasonably well represented in the prospect set. Sure, they didn't have the most cards in the prospect range -- that honor went to the Yankees, of course, with Topps's usual over-abundant love for all things Yankees...I mean, it's still Topps, after all -- but the Brewers did get six players in the set: 3B Lucas Erceg (#7 MIL prospect), P Freddy Peralta (#19), SS/2B Mauricio Dubon (#9) P Phil Bickford (#12), P Josh Hader (#3) and P Luis Ortiz (#4). 

In addition, the Brewers have 7 players in the Bowman Scouts' Top 100: Hader, Ortiz, Bickford, Corey Ray, Lewis Brinson, Trent Clark, and Isan Diaz. Throw in some chrome prospect autographs and a couple of those Scouts' Top 100 autographs in addition to a few other inserts, and I had hope for a really nice return from the case.

So, before we evaluate this case, let's look at the cards. First, the Major League base:

The Bowman brand scaled back the base cards to just 100 major leaguers. You can tell how much in advance that the checklist was put together, though, because the set featured an entirely unnecessary card for David Ortiz, whose love from Topps last year put the fawning over the New York Yankee Rookie flavor of the month to shame. So, with its usual ham-handedness, we get 7 Cubs and 7 Red Sox (and 7 Astros!) from Topps, but only 1 Red (Votto), 1 Angel (Trout), and just 3 Indians, a team I could have sworn played against the Cubs in the World Series last year.

The only Brewer missing here that has shown up in almost every other set this year is Jonathan Villar, last year's stolen base leader in the National League whose struggles at the plate during the first two months of this season have a lot of Brewers fans concerned. I can understand the concern, of course -- it's never good to have a guy slashing at .210/.284/.319 and striking out as many times (71 in 233 plate appearances) as he has. But, he did change positions to second base, and that adjustment can take away from a person's other abilities. It's not easy to change a mindset like that, and I'm sure he focused a lot on fielding in spring training this year.

Okay, let's move onto the paper prospect base cards:

Design-wise, Bowman's design this year seems to be following the trend that the Flagship has set: lots of blurry backgrounds, weird smoke/haze/fog effects on the margins of the cards, and a logo and nameplate area that appears to be designed for ease of use within the Bunt app rather than for use as a physical card. The problem with this, especially when we are talking about Bowman and its parallel-happy printing job, is that some of the parallels are nearly impossible to notice as parallels.

Such as the Silver parallel. The card on the right is the Silver parallel for Freddy Peralta and it is serial numbered to 499. The card on the left is his base card. You have to look really closely to notice that there is a silver coloration in the upper left hand corner near the Bowman logo and along the nameplate at the bottom. Or, you have to run the card under lights and move it back and forth to see the little dotted line feature that comes across far better on the scan here along the left-hand side of the card.

Unfortunately for me, this Peralta was the only Brewers parallel of any kind that came in the case. 

On to the Chrome:

During the video, every time a Chrome card showed up, the lights in Chris's house made it appear as if the card was a refractor. The Chrome parallel is really shiny this year. 

Unfortunately for me, I did not get any refractors -- only base Chrome Prospects cards.

As I mentioned above, the Brewers have seven players in the Scouts' Top 100. I didn't do very well here either:

Out of the 7, I only got 2. The collation on the boxes in this case was terrible. I actually received a total of four cards of the Brewers in this subset -- three of Trent Clark to go with the Brinson. Now, don't get me wrong -- I'm a Trent Clark fan, even if he is essentially a top trade chip with the outfield depth within the Brewer system -- but it would have been nice to get other Brewers from the subset. 

Instead, I'm now surfing eBay to look at pricing on getting the rest.

There were other inserts in the set as well:

I've mentioned this elsewhere before, but it seems like typical Topps to jam Orlando Arcia into the "2017 Rookie of the Year Favorites" subset. Why? Because Arcia is not rookie-eligible any more. Like I said about the David Ortiz card, Topps/Bowman clearly put the checklist together way too early -- I'm guessing that they started in mid-year last year -- and didn't fact check themselves after the season to make sure that everyone listed as a ROY favorite was eligible for the award.

Arcia isn't the only one is this position, either. Alex Bregman and David Dahl also exceeded the number of at-bats/days on the active roster allowed to retain rookie status. So, out of a subset of 15 players allegedly highlighting potential Rookie of the Year candidates, fully 20% of them were not actually eligible to win the award.

Well done, Bowman!

So, you've now seen what I got from this case. All in all, it was quite honestly a terrible case for me. That's not Chris's fault, obviously -- he didn't put the cards in the case. But it means that I'm going to have to hit the aftermarket pretty hard to complete my Bowman run for this year. 

That's a real shame for me.