2008 Heritage Box Break - Part 5: Packs 20-24

My broken heart, while it will never fully heal, is sufficiently mended enough to finish up this box break already. Here's the last five packs and a recap of the entire box.

Pack 20:
73 Dustin Pedroia
209 Lance Berkman
141 Seth Smith
55 Josh Beckett
388 Jason Varitek
67 Rich "All Glory to the Hypnotoad" Hill
C36 chrome Derrek Lee #1311/1959
black Jerry Owens

I don't have the number for the Jerry Owens card because I traded it to Steve already. Rich Hill's card could easily fit in the 1959 set. He has that look of Eisenhower era ennui going on. Probably because he realizes that he's a Cub and will never, ever win a championship. It's funny, I make a lot of cracks towards Mets and Cubs on this blog, yet the Mets fans are the only ones who fight back. Where's the Cubbie faithful? Why no snarking back? Was Lee Elia right? I got an actual good Cubbie in this pack, a Chrome Derrek Lee, so speak up out there. Three Red Sox in this pack and all are photographed against a black glossy painted wall that leaves a big flash glare on the photo. This set is gonna be murder on team collectors. That's three teams each having the same background for all their cards. Seattle has the firing squad wall, A's have the mountain range and the BoSox have the glossy black underground bunker wall. I'm pretty sure the Braves mostly have the Disney spring training stands in their photos, but Topps has been using them in every dang set since the Disney complex opened.

Set Completion - 29.2%

Pack 21:
165 Jeff Francoeur
233 Hanley Ramirez
340 Hank Blalock
217 Jered Weaver
292 Chad Tracy
301 Ronnie Belliard
409 Jon Lester SP
90 black Hideki Matsui

FRENCHY!!! That's all I have to say 'bout Jeff. Jon Lester is one of the low number SPs, he also has the Men In Black right as they use the flashy thing background. Hanley's a great player and he'd be even better if Marlins management didn't just pull the rug out from under him.The rest of the pack is just marks on a checklist. Oh yeah. FRENCHY!!!

Set Completion - 30.6%

Pack 22:
273 Josh Barfield
51 Chad Cordero
299 Jose Reyes
411 Sergio Mitre
359 Paul Byrd
175 Jeff ARGH Weaver
BF4 Bill Mazeroski Flashbacks
196 black Jose Valverde

FRENCHY!!! Sorry, wrong pack. Jeff Weaver is becoming one of my favorite players just for the goofy faces he makes on all his cards. This pack is a whole lot of ugly. Jose Reyes is the only one that doesn't look like they belong in a brute squad. Jose Valverde IS a brute squad! Six foot four, 255 pounds for a relief pitcher? Zoinks. Josh Barfield looked less like this Barfield and more like this one last year. He needs a bounce back year with the Tribe. I got another good flashback card, this one of Bill Mazeroski. I have a feeling he'll be plastered all over the 2009 Heritage set.

Set Completion - 31.8%

Pack 23:
189 Kenji Johjima
85 Jayson Werth
46 Jason Bergman
339 Ian Snell
418 Shaun Marcum
335 Brandon Phillips
NF2 The Day Insert Sets Based on Non-Baseball Subjects Died
176 black Preston Wilson

Great Googlely Moogely this pack sucks. At least posting a scan of Brandon will make Joe happy. He's really the only player worth mentioning at all. 30-30 men are hard to come by. Kenji Johjima always reminds me of Neon Genesis Evangelion. Which is ridiculous because I don't think there is even anyone named Kenji in that series. I guess Kenji and Shinji got cross wired in my brain somehow. You think that's nerdy? I have the entire series on tape. IN JAPANESE*. You think that's really nerdy? I think Misato is totally hot. Completely insane ass kicking anime chicks do it for me, I guess. She's #3 on my anime chicks I like list. No one will ever guess #1 on the list. Not in a million years. The first one who does gets 100 free Heritage cards. No one will get them. Ever. Because no one will guess it correctly. I'm not giving any hints, either. See how terrible this pack is? I would rather let everyone know I like watching anime with pretty girlies instead of writing about these cards. How embarrassing. I'm not saying anything at all about the crappy out of focus Don McLean is overrated guitar card. Everyone knows Buddy Holly died in a student residence in England, not a plane crash anyway. So I'm ignoring this card. I'm just going to yell FRENCHY!!! one more time.

Set Completion - 33.2%

Ok, I'll just make comments for each player on this last one so I avoid another trainwreck like the previous pack.

Last Pack:
105 Alfonso Soriano is a beast. Too bad he's a Cub.
93 Mike Piazza is still out of a job as far as I know. That's just not right.
255 Khalil Greene had a damn good year in '07. Time will tell if the 27 homers was a fluke.
254 Freddy Garcia pitched for the Phillies last year and this card still looks airbrushed.
219 Orlando Hudson just ate a whole pack of extra sour gummy worms.
7 Joey Gathright has played for Tampa and Kansas City. What did he do to deserve that?
432 Yadier Molina is my 8th short print. Only 67 more to go!
337 black Lyle Overbay is glad I'm not yelling Frenchy again. CHIPPER!!!

My, what a long and arduous box break. Let's wrap this one up.

170 different base cards (common, black back & SP's)
24 black backs
8 Short prints - Jon Lester, Yadier Molina, Kaz Matsui, CHIPPER JONES, Chone Figgins, Jose Bautista, Carlos Guillen All Star, Victor Martinez All Star
3 Chrome - Ichiro, Derrek Lee, Barry Zito
2 Flashback - Bill Mazeroski, Brooks Robinson
2 News Flashback - Murder and Death
2 New Age Performers - John Lackey, David Ortiz
1 Then & Now - Johnny Podres & Eric Bedard
1 Buyback - Charley Maxwell
1 auto redemption card - Freddy Sanchez

Set Completion - 34%

Now I can rip open my second box with reckless abandon! I got over a third of the set with this box, so a second one should net me 50 to 60 percent of the entire set easy! Right? Right?? (This is foreshadowing, folks. Ugly things are about to happen)

*Actually most of the tapes are Japanese. There are one or two in English. Japanese is really the way to go on this series, the English dubbed voices can get really obnoxious. Especially the southern drawl of Asuka and constant whiling of Shinji. Yes, I know you don't care. I don't care that you don't care.

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...