Teeny Target Trip

So on the way home from my most recent card show visit (that's a different post) I stopped at a Target I usually never bother with. But I was in dire need of an iced coffee and that was the nearest Starbucks location.

Of course I hit the card aisle and ended up grabbing this box on a whim. I didn't quite know what they meant by the 4 packs/50 cards/bonus business but I soon found out. Here's what was inside:

The packs were pretty mundane. The two Draft Picks packs were a waste. Logo-less cards of guys I've never heard of. The cards suck. And there were only four to a pack...which made me think of the Woody Allen bit in Annie Hall where he retells the old joke about the food at a Catskills resort.

I already have the Babe Ruth set so that pack is dupes. The Heritage pack wasn't bad. I pulled a Manny Machado and a card I could use in my fantasy binder, Andrew Cashner.

The white box held the 50 cards. It was a John Smoltz hot box as I got three(!) cards of his and a load of other trade fodder. The Smoltz trio was interesting because I was listening to him educate Joe Buck on big league pitching as I was flipping thru the cards. Everything else was the same sort of thing that shows up in every Fairfield repack...junk wax era Donruss..2012 to 2015 Topps and a scattering of 1990s cards featuring lots of gold foil over fake granite borders...i.e. 1994 Pinnacle Select.

The 'bonus' was two packs of TeenyMates. I will admit that I've never seen these things before. Each pack contained two 'mates' representing MLB teams, a couple of puzzle pieces and a foldout which serves as ad piece, checklist and info sheet.

I was puzzled by them being all catchers but I went to the webpage and figured out that there are several series of these things and each series featured a position or baseball pose. They also listed some special 'TeenyMates' and gave the a category of  'common', 'rare', and 'ultra rare'. The rare ones are 'gold', glow-in-the-dark or uniform variations. They have them for all the major sports. Who knew?

From the front I had a hard time seeing which teams were represented among my four new little friends. My crappy phone pics don't help here so I'll tell you that I got a Padre, Pirate, Cub and Brewer.

Here are the two sides of the enclosed flyer. I gotta say that I liked these more than a soon-to-be 65 year old probably should. I'll end up giving these to my wife to use as rewards for the kids she tests but first I'll let them sit on my desktop and watch a bit of postseason ball with me.

Fairfield Bubble Pack from Target, Part #2

The cards from the other side of this plastic hanger package from Fairfield were more interesting than the first ones. And here are a few:

1986 Topps Glossy Fernando Valenzuela. Back when he broke in with such a splash even my in-laws got caught up in Fernandomania. We saw him pitch in the Astrodome and he lost to the Astros' Don Sutton. In all the years since Fernando left the scene I've never seen my father-in-law so much as glance as a baseball game.

There were four other cards from this subset in the pack including Ryne Sandberg, Dwight Gooden, Kirby Puckett and Teddy Higuera.

1990 Donruss Gary Carter. Sure it's junk wax, but it's Gary Carter! Everyone liked Gary Carter, didn't they? Interestingly the 'Contract Status' text on the back notes that he was released by the Mets in October of 1989. Carter played for the Giants in 1990 and the Dodgers in 1991 before a return to the Expos for one final season in '92.

Here are a pair of Fleer rookie cards from 2006. Chad Billingsley and someone named Boof Bonser. I would have bet money that Bonser was Fleer's version of Sid Finch but he turned out to be a legit player. See, I learn so much from these cards.

As noted both are Fleer, both are rookie cards but they have different formats. I see the 'Tradition' notation on the Billingsley so I guess that's why they are different. Both have blank space on the back that says '---No MLB Experience---' but both have text blurbs that point out the respective player's debut in 2006.

I really like the Billingsley card, it's got sort of a '63-ish Topps vibe.

1997 Topps Chipper Jones. Jones put together a Hall of Fame career while I wasn't paying attention. I pretty much bailed on baseball in 1994 and didn't come back until two or three years ago. Next thing I knew there was a Chipper Jones Farewell Tour going on and I was left wondering what I had missed. Turns out I missed a lot.

I hadn't remembered seeing any '97 Topps that that were green but this is a pretty sharp card. Was green an 'alternate' color?

After I scanned this 1988 Fleer Gwynn/Coleman and have added it to this post I remembered that I never cared much for this se . But Gwynn's a H-O-Famer and you can read his undershirt through his jersey. So there ya go.

I'm pretty sure this is the only Mariano Rivera card that I own. This and the next card made the price of the pack worthwhile. I'm no Yankee fan but to deny the greatness of Mariano Rivera is silly. Plus, the few times I've heard/seen him speak he has come off as a pretty genuine guy. So all in all i was happy to find this among the flotsam and jetsam of the Fairfield re-pack. The only thing I don't like is the dark gold foil which is incredibly hard to read without turning the card at an angle.

And finally:

A 1989 Cap'n Crunch Darryl Strawberry. Cereal cards are so cool! I've got Post Cereal cards, and oodles of Kellogg's' cards and I even have a 1930's Wheaties football card around here someplace but I never had seen a Cap'n Crunch card. Oddball stuff can be fun, especially when it is of a player with some 'star power'. But I wonder why the card has an airbrushed cap. The card carries the Topps logo so wouldn't they have a license to show the mlb logos? Or is it incumbent upon the distributor/sponsor, in this case the Quaker Oats Company, to obtain a licence no matter who published them. Whatever, it's a fun addition to my pile of 'stuff'.

Among the other cards I'm not showing were cards of some of my favorite players, Kevin Bass, Rick Dempsey (as a Dodger :-/ ), and Jesse Orosco. All in all I don't regret spending the $4. maybe I'll make this a yearly treat.

Fairfield Bubble Pack from Target, Part #1

A couple of weeks ago I was in Target and bought one pack each of 2013 Gypsy Queen and Archives. After I opened them I had the same feeling I had about three weeks into my fantasy baseball league. I'd be better off giving my cash to someone who could put it to good use, like a homeless person.
I spent $6 or $8 or whatever it was and the stuff I got wasn't much fun and was instantly forgettable. But when I had been there I saw some of the Fairfield re-packs that folks blog about from time to time. There were a couple of options including one that guaranteed an 'autograph or relic' card. Cost was $12 I think. Pfffft.... I was not about to drop $12 on an autograph of some schmoe I had no interest in, so I passed. I also saw these $3.99 hanging packs of 100 cards. I ended up not buying any because I had the GQ and Archive packs in hand but I kept them in mind.
I was back at Target a few days later and figured I'd pick one up. There were about eight of them on the rack and I picked out the only one that did not have a 1986 Will Clark All Star card showing on the back. For $4, about the cost of a pack of new cards, I'd get 100 cards and they were sure to be, even if worthless, more interesting than the Charlie Hough on an '87 design Archive. And I was right. On both counts. The 100 cards I received are pretty much without any value but they sure were more interesting than those two packs of 2013s.
I busted one side of the blister at a time and went through them slowly. Here's some of what was among the 50 cards the right side.

Yup, three Jose Mesa cards. They were packed consecutively and near the front of the stack, too. Now, while I dig big ol' relievers with intimidating stuff this wasn't promising. It made me wonder about how these things are collated.
 I waded through more riff-raff like 2010 Topps, '91 Fleers and minor league shiny cards of guys who never made it. But I got a few cards that I liked immediately.

A 1991 Carlton Fisk All Star that also has the 1990 AL Triples leaders listed on the back.

A 1995 Topps Walt Weiss. I had to look at this a second or two before it was clear to me that it's an action sequence of Weiss turning a dp. I haven't seen this used on a card other than this one.

Hall of Famer Robin Yount's 1987 Topps. Now a real '87 card beats a phony '87 card any day, at least in my book.

This card is from a company called Invincible and it's a card of Fernando Seguignol. I looked him up and he played for the Expos and then went to Japan, came back stateside to play for the Yanks before he went back to Japan to continue his career. But the interesting thing was how this card contains some sort of plastic insert. The circle containing the player portrait is semi-transparent and is like a film slide. Never seen that before.

This shiny Upper Deck Matt Kemp card was one of the ones that showed on the outside of the package. It's one of the reasons I selected this particular hanger pack. I have a small Matt Kemp collection. I wish he was so glad he's back helping my fantasy team these days. 

The best of the other 50 cards will come in another post.