The Slowest Box Break Ever, Final Wrap-up

You know, if I had any style, I'd just postpone this post for another couple of hours and make it an even month from the first to the last post for this box break. It's time to let it go though. The box break is finally over.

First though, there were some questions on whether some of the prospect cards or even base cards were short printed as they were showing up erratically in box breaks. After looking around a bit online, I think this may just be due to a collation quirk in some box breaks. I personally got more even numbered prospects by 2:1 over odd numbers, but I've also gotten a few random retail packs in a row were both prospects cards were odd numbered. If you bust enough of this stuff, things will probably even out eventually. If there were really short prints, the dealers would have picked up on it by now after they built up a bunch of hand collated sets. I don't blame anyone for being paranoid about it though after Topps' rather random use of skip numbered short prints and unannounced and indecipherable parallels recently.

Now, on with the totals:

Hobby Box:

Base Set:
Base Cards: 110/250 44%

No Sig Short Prints (1:3): 7/45 16%
184 Tom Gorzellany no sig SP
188 Roy Halladay no sig SP
196 Nick Markakis no sig SP
199 Felix Hernandez no sig SP
235 Alex Gordon no sig RC SP
238 Glen Perkins no sig RC SP
243 Hideki Okajima no sig RC SP

Mantle Short prints : 0/5 0%

Bowman Prospects (2:1): 48/100 48%

Checklists: 2 complete sets of 3

Parallels:
Rainbow Parallel: 21/251 8%

Black Parallel #/52: (1)
194 black parallel Jeremy Sowers #32/52

Red Parallel #/1: none

Inserts:
Pieces of Greatness: (3)
PG-JE Juan Elpido Encarnacion bat card
PG-LG Luis Emilio Gonzalez bat card
PG-NS Nick Thompson Swisher bat card

Signs of Greatness: (2)
SG-AF Andrew Fie
SG-CC Carl Crawford

Press Plates: none

'55 Red Man Box topper: (1)
21 Alex Gordon

A-Rod Waste of Space cards:
two unknown still in wrapper most likely never to be opened

But wait, there's more: I also busted a Blaster of this stuff, 8 packs for 20 bucks. Here's what I got out of that:

Retail Box:

Base Set:
Base Cards: 37/250 15%

No Sig Short Prints (1:3): 3/45 7%
198 BJ Upton no sig SP
200 Barry Bonds no sig SP
232 Dallas Braden no sig RC SP

Mantle Short prints : 0/5 0%

Bowman Prospects (2:1): 16/100 16%

Checklists: #2 and #3

Parallels:
Rainbow Parallel: 7/251 3%

Black Parallel #/52: none

Red Parallel #/1: none

Inserts:
Pieces of Greatness: (1)
PG-AD Adam Dunn jersey card

Signs of Greatness: (0)

All in all, a couple of great box breaks for a nice product. Two extra hits in a Hobby box is always nice and anytime you pull a jersey from a retail blaster you're doing pretty good for yourself. The Dunn relic was a jersey too, which was nice since all three of the hobby relics were bats. Out of the two boxes, I have over half the set and a tenth of the short prints. There were no dupes in either box. The only thing I'm disappointed in is not pulling a Mantle card. I love the fact that the set can be completed without having to dig for short prints, but it would have been nice to have at least one of the Mantle cards be a common. I'll probably dig around eBay or Sportlots for them instead of waiting to pull them from wax. Last year's Mantle card wasn't short-printed and I still didn't pull it out of a pack till last August or September when I found a Quik Trip with a dusty half-box of Bowman Heritage left in the back of the card rack.

Since this is sadly probably the last Bowman Heritage set, over the next week or so I'm going to be ranking all seven sets from 2001 to 2007. I'll grade each one based on things such as the checklist, inserts and how well they pulled off the design and we'll see which one ends up as the best Bowman Heritage set. I've got an idea of which one is best but we'll see what happens once the grades are totaled. This set may end up ranking pretty high, it's really the only Topps baseball product since Allen and Ginter that I've liked. Oh well. 2008 Topps isn't that far away...