It's Opening Day

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. 

Here is the second set of mascot cards.  

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.  

The Blue Jays had the Cy Young Award winner last year in Robbie Ray, but he did not get a place on their card? 

On the Dodgers card, there are about five players that could be substituted for Bellinger.  

Verdugo deserves to be on as few baseball cards as possible. He had some questionable behavior as a Minor Leaguer. Questionable, like police investigation.  I don't boo, but I would boo Verdugo.  

The Padres card and the inclusion of Eric Hosmer was covered by Fuji over at San Jose Fuji.  He also posted cards from Opening Day.   

The last card with Acuna, Little Vlad, and Tatis is fine, although I prefer the team cards.  

Last group of cards.....

These home run themed cards are not very interesting cards.  

I am happy that Opening Day is here, not sure I can say the same thing the Opening Day baseball cards.