What's the cure for getting up at 3:30 in the morning and spending an eight-hour shift at the filling station? Opening a box of baseball cards when you get home, of course. I decided to go with one of my blaster boxes because I would open slightly more cards than a jumbo pack, plus I'm really intrigued about the Retired Number patches. I hope a get a good one.

I'm going to break this down, old school. Pack by pack, with the highlights and the interesting cards. It will take a while and make for a long post, but I view this as my triumphant return to the world of baseball card blogging. Like the title of the post says, away we go...

See, I really do have the cards. In the background you can see the binder, all loaded up with 37 plastic sleeves and ready to store some cards.


Here's the patch card. I think I'll save it for last. One year ago today, I pulled the ol' hidden patch trick. I promise I won't do that this time. No April foolin'.

No lie, the first card staring me in the face was a freakin' Yankee. Not only that, it was a Yankee who's not even a Yankee any more (Jesus Montero). This is not a good omen.



If these are representative examples of the insert sets, I won't have any problems not collecting them. Color me underwhelmed with Golden Moments and Classic Walk-Offs. Still, it's nice to get a Votto in the first pack.


Also, I'm not too impressed with the Photoshopping techniques used to blur out the other players in these two cards. They look really, really sloppy. I'd just as soon Topps didn't retouch the photos. I understand wanting to put the focus on the player whose name in on the front of the card, but there are better ways to do that than this.


Thoughts from Pack 2: The Chris Sale card was the first one I was really excited to get...Nice to see that Topps got the new Marlins logo on the front of the cards, even nicer to see they didn't feel the need to airbrush everyone's hat and uniform to reflect the change...Are Golden Moments and Classic Walk-Offs the only insert sets? Once again, I got one of each...Randy Wells really needs to get more fiber in his diet.


Thoughts from Pack 3: Nice to see Joey Bats get the coveted #100 for his card...Just when I thought the insert sets couldn't get any worse, I pulled a Gold Standard card. Worse yet, it was A-Fraud. I refuse to scan it on the grounds that doing so would violate the Geneva Convention...I think I like the gold parallels more than last year's diamond parallels, but I wasn't aware that the 61st anniversary was the Golden anniversary...I also pulled an Austin Romine card. If you're scoring at home, that's two Yankees catching prospects in three packs. Who says there's a New York bias in the checklists?


Thoughts from Pack 4: FREDDIE!!!...You can imagine my excitement when I opened the pack to see an Angels logo and the word "Albert", followed by my disappointment when I saw "o Callaspo"...I got my first Golden Giveaway card. I assume the principle is the same as the Diamond Giveaway and the Million Card Giveaway. Is the gimmick as least good? I liked the virtual rings for some reason...I forget; is R.A. Dickey called "The Thing," or is it his weird off-speed pitch, or his freakish, ulnar-ligament-free pitching arm?


Thoughts from Pack 5: I got my first Oriole (Alfredo Simon) and first Athletic (Andrew Carignan), so I'm just waiting on my first Reds base card...The one exception I have to my staunch anti-Yankees on baseball cards stance; anything that involves Jason Giambi's porn stache (RIP). Not even A-Rod's second appearance in the blaster can ruin that...Casey McGehee's 2012 card may have the best picture used for a baseball card in the past decade.


Time for a mid-blaster break. So far, I have pulled only three insert cards that I deem worth keeping. The Votto card was one. Above are the other two.

You know what? I just looked at a preview of this post. It's already pretty long, and adding the other five packs is just going to make it longer. So I'm going to split it up into two posts. See you in a couple of hours with part two.