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.  

Fan Of Game-Used Dirt

Twenty years ago relic cards were pretty popular.  Half-inch swatches of swatches of bats and jerseys that may or may not have been worn or used by a player during a game.  At some point there was a huge scandal with these cards, which I am not going to rehash in this space, and they have slowly disappeared over the last few years. 

I have boxes full of these bat and jersey cards.  I am not sure what to do with the relic cards at this point, other than to pull them out and look through them.  I don't think they are worth anything and I do not know anyone who collects them at this point. 

Still, there are some of these relic cards that are still really fun and unique. 

One of my favorite all-time relic sets was the Stadium Club game-used dirt inserts, which were in the 2000 set.  Still pretty popular cards, so I understand why Topps has recreated these cards and put them into Opening Day the past two or three years.  

I don't do much with Opening Day, but I really like the dirt relics.  

The player choice was a no doubter, although Jack Flaherty also has a game-used dirt card.  That might be a card that I had to my watch list.  

I am 100% that this game-used dirt was likely never touched by Blake Snell or even his cleats.  I am basing that statement on the disclaimer on the back of the card.  

I am just going to ignore that statement.  I am a fan of the game-used dirt.  

Opening Day Mediocrity

I decided to take a test drive on the Periscope app and needed a test subject to try out.  I picked up two blasters ($9.99 each) from my local Target to use as my muse.  I am not sure I have opened more than a pack of Opening Day since 2000.  In my opinion, Opening Day is just a cheaply made rehash of the regular Topps set with a flashy flag bunting and logo on the card.  I will go ahead and walk that opinion back a little bit, but not all the way.

Essentially the base set of the Opening Day product is a rehash of the base Topps set.  Same pictures, but limited run of players.  Opening Day has been this way for years, but Topps has added a few other features to the product to improve the quality just a little bit.  I actually really like the look of the blue parallels out of the Opening Day set.  I think I said the same thing about the gold parallels in the regular set.

I like these and pulled a total of four of them out of my two Blaster boxes.  I feel like the blue border just gives the cards a little bit of a different look than the regular Opening Day cards.  The color gives it a little bit more distance from the regular Topps set.  On to the inserts.....

In past years Opening Day did not have any inserts.  I went through and looked at some of the older sets and it looks like the inserts have been in Opening Day for the last five or six years.  I guess the inserts include autographs and relic cards though I did not pull any of them.

The two most common insert sets in the Opening Day product are the Hit the Dirt and Stadium Scenes cards.  I like both inserts for the same reason: unique players.  I like Ian Kinsler, good player, but when do you see him get an insert card?  Next to never.  These Hit the Dirt inserts are pretty easy to track down and I picked up six of these cards in my packs.  Should be easy to finish off.  

The Stadium Scenes cards feature pictures by fans.  A lot of the cards seem to feature players signing autographs like the Sean Doolittle card above.  Again, there are some unique players in this set.  I saw Sean Doolittle play for UVa back in the day and have enjoyed following his career.  Cool to see him on an insert.  I also landed a Jordan Zimmerman and a cool card of Yasiel Puig and the Gateway Arch.

The rest of the insert cards seem kind of blah.  The mascot cards are back.....

Does the White Sox card even have a name?  Not sure about that.  I think Opening Day has done mascots for a few years now.  It seems that a lot of the chatter surrounding this set involves these mascot cards.  I am not sure why.  I guess it was cool once or twice, but maybe the well is running dry.

Same with the celebration cards.  Weren't these a variation in the regular Topps set?  meh and a yawn.

Last two insert sets look like copies of Upper Deck insert sets from the 2000s.

These look a lot like something out of the 2001 Upper Deck 1970s Baseball set, but that product is a lot cooler than Opening Day.  If you read the Night Owl Blog he always has posts about that set.

This looks like the holographic cards out of the 2004 Upper Deck Vintage set.  Again, the Upper Deck set is much better.

Overall this is a real hit or miss product.  I spent $20 on 22 packs, but would have probably been better served just buying one or two of the insert sets off of Ebay.  The base set is a not so nice rehash of the regular Topps base set and some of the insert sets have gotten a little long in the tooth and are missable.