It's Opening Day.
I am not sure how excited I should be for the Cardinals or Durham Bulls this year, but it is always nice to have baseball to watch. To celebrate, I ventured to the local Wally World and found a pair of Opening Day boxes. After the dearth of current year cards posted on my blog over the past two years, I thought it would be fun to open a few packs for a change.
This is the design of this year's Topps flagship set, as well as the Opening Day set.
That little logo in the bottom corner is the only thing that separates the two sets.
I do not want to get into the design with Opening Day too much. At some point I will post some of the cards I have pulled out of packs of Topps Series 1. I will wait until that post to be more opinionated about the design and appearance of these cards. For this post, I am going to post some scans of the insert cards that make Opening Day unique.
Yes, I did land a copy of Wander Franco's rookie card out of one of the packs of Opening Day.
I had thought about doing some sort of Wander Franco rookie card count as the year went along.
It might need some work.
On to the Opening Day cards.
This is the first insert, which shows the Opening Day from 2021 for each of the teams. I pulled 9 cards out of two boxes. My favorite two cards here are the Tigers and Red Sox, which are in the bottom row.
I like the snow on the Tigers card.
Opening Day also has mascot cards. These are the highlight of the Opening Day set, right? Seems like one of the bright spots that collectors frequently talk about with this product. I pulled a total of 15 cards from my Opening Day packs.
Orbit is easily the best mascot here. Sorry, Fredbird, but any mascot who trolls J.P. Arenciba is quality in my book. I have a funny story about his wife, who is some famous country singer, but that's for a different post. Here is some of Orbit's quality work with J.P.
Billy the Marlin is great, but I will go with the Pirate Parrot as the best card in this group of mascots. Can you think of another mascot who was found guilty of selling Joaquin Andujar and Keith Hernandez cocaine?
The Pirates have updated the mascot costume over the last 30 to 40 years. That's honestly too bad.
Are those the same legs as Big Bird?
Next up are these perforated cards. I pulled a total of six cards in two boxes. In retrospect, this was not the best way to present these cards, but I am not going to go back and rescan all of these cards. I feel like some of these trios are a little questionable.
Those signs are great. Is their some sort of story behind the mascot trolling that particular player?
ReplyDeleteThe Astros mascot is famous for targeting one player on opposing teams. Most of the players ignore it. A few years back, he picked on Chris Archer from the Rays and they actually had a back and forth prank war throughout the season. Just one video where Chris Archer presents him a fake degree and pelts him with water balloons, but there are others.
Deletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kuJsfnKj1Ls
Thanks for sharing the Orbit/JP relationship thing. What a crackup.
ReplyDeleteP.S. I'm starting to think the Swinging Friar and Thumper are short prints in the mascot set.
I will keep that in mind as I work on trying to finish off the set this week. I did a quick Ebay search after reading your comment. It looks like they are on there for a reasonable price, but maybe I will buy now to make sure.
Delete