National Baseball Card Day Thingy

I almost forgot about this... Tomorrow is National Baseball Card Day. Basically if you go to a hobby shop tomorrow you get a free pack of cards. Each pack will have 5 Topps cards, 5 Upper Deck cards and 2 out of 6 rookies, so you can't get a complete set. It's National Baseball Card Day instead of National Trading Card Day most likely to squeeze Donruss, Press Pass and the rest out of the promotion.

If you can call it a promotion, I haven't seen much publicized about it before this week. Noting at the cards shops, not much online. The official link on The Brill Report didn't even work 'till yesterday. Good promotion, guys. The packs will also be given out at Ballparks for Opening Day (good) and at Toys R Us (huh?). Considering these promo packs were originally meant to bring traffic to hobby stores (and were a rip off of the wildly successful Free Comic Book Day), That's a surprising move. Of course with the crappy sets they've been marketing to kids lately, maybe the hobby needs all the promotion it can get. Toys R Us is doing their part at least, this ad came in the mail yesterday:


Woo hoo! Super Star Packs. Whatever those are. Topps couldn't even be arsed to put together their own pack though. No mention of the free cards though. Did they come up with this thing at the last minute or something? I really shouldn't complain about free cards, but anyone who remembers the hobby store events and monster packs of swag that was given away a few years ago would be disappointed in this stealth holiday. It just seems that the manufacturers this year are putting about 10% effort into everything. Really, it's not that hard to put together a decent promotion and actually promote the thing. They did it just a couple of years ago. Here's the checklist for those who need more prompting to go pick a pack up after my glowing review.

Topps:
Ryan Howard
David Wright
David Ortiz
Alex Rodriguez
Vladimir Guerrero
Joey Votto (1:3)
Clay Buchholz (1:3)
Daric Barton (1:3)

Upper Deck:
Prince Fielder
Albert Pujols
Derek Jeter
Ichiro
Ken Griffey Jr
Ian Kennedy (1:3)
Luke Hochevar (1:3)
Chin Lung Hu (1:3)

I don't remember where I read it, but I saw somewhere that the promotion was discontinued a couple of years ago due to dealers putting the packs up on eBay. Heh.