1994 Upper Deck Fun Pack

Way back here I asked what pack you all wanted to see. I didn't really count but it seemed like Fun Pack won over Topps Big so here's yer Fun Pack. Which is good because I had already opened the Fun Pack. Let's have some FUN!

6 fun, cool, action-filled cards in every pack! I shall rate each card for fun factor, coolness and action-fillitude.

211 Tony Gwynn All-Star Advice

Fun? Hells yeah! Chalkboard drawing is always fun and Tony's a fun guy.

Cool? I'd say so. this is a nifty little subset. Very early-'90s gaudy/busy.

Action-packed? Check out Tony's sweet swing. Tony is the guy who churns out the prospects at San Diego State (Including David Clyde Jr.) so if he gives you some advice YOU LISTEN TO IT.

166 Frank Viola

Fun? No. Frank Viola played for the Mets and Twins, two of my absolute least favorite teams.

Cool? The base card design reminds me of a splash screen from ToeJam & Earl, so, yeah. Pretty cool.

Action packed? Nope. The cartoon viola throwing a pitch is more animated that Frank here.

218 Cal Ripken Jr. Foldouts

Fun? Yeah! Cal Ripken Jr. on a weird foldy card that looks like a Trapper Keeper!

Cool? Wait... this is numbered as a base card, but the pack says it's inserted 1:9 packs... GASP! This is a short print! Short prints in 1994! NOT COOL!

Action-packed? Cal is running for his life from a giant ghost of himself! THAT'S ACTION!

115 Randy Johnson

Fun? Check out the cartoon on the back. Randy is the King of K's! The King of K's should meet the King of Cartoons - that would be REALLY FUN!

Cool? I dunno, is Big Unit cool?

Action-packed? Yes! Randy looks like he's going to bust right out of the card. The thing can barely contain him as it is!

99 Barry Bonds Glow Stars

Fun? Barry Bonds sucks all the fun out of anything...

Cool? I don't care who is on the thing, glow in the dark stuff is always cool.

Action-packed? Well, not so much action packed as really really busy. This card should only be viewed in the dark.

81 Mark Grace

Fun? Hell yeah! Every time I see a card of Mark Grace I remember his interview on Jim Rome about slumpbusters. That was fun.

Cool? Mark looks like he's sitting on the right side border. I think it's cool.

Action-packed? the border squeezes it a bit but that's still a bang-bang pickoff play at first base. Verdict: ACTION.

Final Verdict:
Fun factor: 66%
Coolness quotient: 83%
Action packed percentage: 66%

Every card in the pack was at least fun, cool or action-packed, with half the pack being all three. This pack lives up to Upper Deck's bold promise!

A good pack spoiled

I ended up on another late night Wally World mission tonight. I didn't wanna go, but sometimes you have to make sacrifices. I sacrificed by picking up a few packs of Topps out of boredom. I was hoping for a code card or two to hold in reserve. It's a giant march of the late '70s in there right now so I won't be redeeming any anytime soon, but it's nice to have 'em just in case. I unfortunately got none, but I did get what could have been an awesome pack if not for a horrible flaw. My flaw, let me show it to you.

93 Joe Nathan

Joe's decent, too bad he's hurt. There's an odd baseball stitching shaped bump on the front of the card. I have no clue how it got there.

148 Cody Ross

Fish annoy me, but this is a great photo.

273 Pat Neshek

The patron saint of card bloggers. One of these days I need to get over my irrational fear of pestering celebrities and send a card to Pat to get signed.

100 Albert Pujols

Keeping the 'Best Player in Baseball by a Wide Margin" seat warm for Jason Heyward for the next few years. Gotta love pullin' an Albert. 

20 Tommy Hanson

YEEEAH TOMMY. The dude's been in the league less than a year and he's already the Ace of the staff. This is shaping up to be a hell of a pack and we haven't even gotten to the inserts yet.

259 Daniel Hudson

Don't know who he is, but he's a rookie. Next is the last card before the inserts, let's see what we go-

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

OOOOOOOOOO

OOOOO

OOO

O

I hate everything about this card. Fffff - I just - auugh. Does someone need this? please take it from me.

TR39 Vlad Guerrero Turkey Red

I need this card but I can't enjoy it. The pain is too fresh.

No 1 in a series of 45 Babe Ruth Blue Back

Oh thank goodness, the power of a Good Yankee can overpower the power of an Evil one. This is the perfect card to sooth my shaken spirit.

TTT6 Ichiro ToppsTown

Any Ichiro is a good Ichiro. Things are starting to seem normal again. I finally tried out Topps Town and I was not impressed. My kid might like it though, so I think I'll give him my codes this weekend and let him go to town, so to speak.

50 Zach Grienke

I got a bunch of Greinke cards in the packs I got. Just one of those weird collation quirks I guess. All of them are going in a package I am mailing to Heartbreaking cards tomorrow 'cuz I really just don't need 'em. Matt is happy I got stuck at work today and had no time to hit the post office now.

113 Willy Tavares

Nice looking card of Willy about to try to beat out an infield hit.

That could have been a very good pack if not for the awfulness. I will try to think of the pleasant cards like Hanson and Ruth instead of gimmicky abominations. I just need to remember that this too shall pass.

2009 O-Pee-Chee Hobby Vs. Retail comparison

Here is the first retail pack of retail O-Pee-Chee and the first pack of hobby O-Pee-Chee I opened. Let's compare, shall we?

PRICE:

Hobby
$1.75 at Champion Sports Cards
Retail
$1.57 at Wal-Mart

Strange how the cents got transposed like that... I've vowed to only buy Hobby O-Pee-Chee from now on to support the local card shop. Of course that means I won't buy any at all, because I'm saving my money for a box of '09 A&G. Isn't it a shame I'm so undisciplined that I have to trick myself like that?

NEVER TELL ME THE ODDS:

Hobby
Game Used Memorabilia card - 1:108, Autographed card - 1:216
Retail
No odds for retail buying plebeians!

THE WRAPPER:

Hobby
Blue and red wrapper design with yellow lettering and a stylized drawing of what appears to me to be Ken Griffey Jr. in a Mariners uniform. Very reminiscent of a typical Topps wrapper from the 70's. Actually, very similar to a '77 O-Pee-Chee wrapper.

Retail
Huge photo of Ryan Braun with a bright yellow border and a red banner beseeching you to collect all 600 cards. The O-Pee-Chee logo is also much more prominent.

UDU CODES:

Hobby

Retail

Be nice and only use one and let us know in the comments which one has been used up mmmkay!

THE CARDS:

Hobby

137 Rick Ankiel
Solid portrait, although I wish these whippersnapper douchebags would freaking SMILE. You made more money in one at bat where you struck out with the winning run on third with one out than I'll make working 80-hour weeks until 2038. SMILE ALREADY.

WK4 JD Drew Walk-Off Winners
My first insert and it's this guy. MEh.

439 Johnny Damon Black border
The black border just makes him look smarmier doesn't it?

544 Ichiro Moments DP
ICHIRO. Alll Riiiiiight. You'll notice I've put a DP up by the card name. This is shorthand for "Double Printed" which was a common tag for Topps cards made before they upped the set size to 792. Basically, the way they printed up the cards had several cards on more than one sheet so they are more readily available. Since the cards from 501-600 are more readily available they are now DPs as far as I am concerned. So don't be fooled when Beckett lists them as SPs at a premium in their next price guide, because they are not short printed and should not have any premium attached to them.

158 Steve Pearce
Why is Steve standing in front of a shower curtain??
Why does this make me like the set even more than I already did???

438 Eddie Guardado
Eddie are you ok, are you ok Eddie...

Other than the Ichiro, this was not a great pack by any means... Yet I still am strangely drawn to the set. Could cheesy posed shots in front of shower curtains really have that much of an effect on me??

Retail

72 Jhonny Peralta
Cool pattern in the background with the mesh. There is also the slightest, barest hint of a smile on Jhonny's face. Not a manic grin, but just a subtle look of contentment. Much better than that crosseyed mushmug Ankiel. SMILE DAMMIT!

332 Kyle Kendrick Black border
An actual diamond cut card in 2009. How retro can you get?
For those who don't know what the heck a diamond cut card is, imagine it this way. There's a sheet of cards going through the cutter to be separated. The horizontal cut goes fine, but in trasferring the card to the vertical cutter the strips get a tiny bit askew. As a result the vertical cut is no longer perpendicular to the horizontal cut so the card is now shaped slightly like a diamond. This was common in the '80s and earlier, but not so much recently.

1495 Minnesota Wild 20th anniversary
This one is already in the mail to VOTC so no pic. It's a hockey dude, much to Chris Harris' chagrin.

550 Jonathan Papelbon Moments DP
He sure ain't no Ichiro...

342 Brian Moehler
Well, if you're going to have 500 players in a set there's going to be a few Brian Moehlers running around.

41 Xavier Nady
This is a very nice action shot amidst the cheese. Fulls swing by Nady, the catcher looking to see how far that hit will go, Yankees milling about the dugout, a healthy crowd in the Bronx. Very nice indeed.

This was the first OPC pack I opened and had I not bought three more it would have been the last pack I would have opened. Lord, this pack was teh s uck. Yet, from this bad start I ended up really liking the set. Imagine that.

NUMBER OF CARDS WITH A ROLLER MARK RUNNING RIGHT DOWN THE MIDDLE:

Hobby
1 - JD Drew so who gives a flip
Retail
3 - Papelbon, Moehler, Nady

I'm beginning to view roller marks on Upper Deck cards not as a flaw but a feature, much like foil stamping or a hologram. Maybe one of these days I'll build an entire set of roller marked cards and play it off like they are a rare parallel set.

VERDICT:

The two packs are virtually the same thing for the same price. You've got a slightly better shot of getting something nice if you buy a hobby box but buying by the pack it doesn't really matter. Like I said, I'm limiting myself to Hobby packs partly to support the local shop and partly to make sure I don't waste any more money I could be spending on A&G. I have to say this though: this set has grown on me like a fungus. I'll be squirting the hell out of it with Tinactin right now, but a couple months from now I'll get slack and end up with a box or three and a horrible, burning itch.

I am a Nerdy Twit

Note: Dinged Corners is having feed issues. They are alive and kicking and can be found here:

I hopped on board the fad train to TweetyTown and got myself a Twitter account. For someone who was deeply skeptical about FaceBook until recently this may seem like a ludicrous act. What the hell can you do with Twitter anyway? How can you possibly express any useful information in 140 characters? Well, it ain't easy, but I had a breakthrough during a training class on Friday.

I'm working on a CCNA certification and am currently taking a class towards that end. The stuff I was going over on Friday was heavy on the math - packet headers, binary numbering system, subnet masks. Basically squeezing a lot of useful information into a small amount of bytes. During my lunch break I headed to Target to pick up a new notebook (I take a lot of notes and mine had just run out) and I snagged a pack of Heritage to serve as a distraction from all those 1s and 0s.

Most of this stuff is just review for me so I took my notes and idly flipped through the cards. It then occurred to me that 140 characters is actually a whole lot of information. Heck, you only need 32 bits for an IPv4 address. So 140 characters can be useful, but how can it be useful? What problem can it solve for me?

Well, one problem I have with this blog is that I am suffering from pack rip constipation. I want to post pack rips on A Pack a Day and A Pack to Be Named Later, but time has been tight and it takes as long to post a pack rip as it does a decently researched article. I've also bought a fraction of the packs I normally do this year so I don't want to waste a good pack rip by actually sorting the cards into my set before I've taken the time to type it out and scan the cards but that's time consuming. So as a result about half of the packs I've bought this year are sitting on my desk opened but unsorted. Yes, I have mental problems. You're just noticing this now? Now, if there was a way I could post those pack rips as quickly as possible I could flush through the banal rips and save the good ones for posting. But you can't possibly tweet a pack rip can you? Let's examine.

So what information do you really need to share what cards you pulled in a pack? Well, the name of the product and the cards inside, of course. Pics and prices and commentary and links and YouTube videos are cute, but all you really need is the product and the cards. So can you tweet that in 140 characters? Let's break it down.

How many characters do you need to express the name of the pack? Well let's look at the names of some products. 2009 Upper Deck Series 2. 1987 Topps. 2008 Topps Baseball Updates and Highlights presents 2009 Topps Heritage High Number Series. That last one wipes out the tweet by itself, but let's truncate it to 2008 Heritage High. Heck, you can cut these names down further and still have collectors know what you're talking about. 09 UD2. 87 Topps. 09 HeritageHigh. So anywhere from 6 to 15 characters. Let's leave some wiggle room and make it 20 characters for the name of the pack, that leaves up to 120 for the cards.

So what do you need to list the cards? Card number and name would be helpful. If it's an insert or numbered that can add some extra characters but there's usually only a couple per pack. Card numbers at most will take 4 characters for an Upper Deck 1000 card set. Add a space to make it five. Names are generally three characters (Ott) to 14 characters long (Saltalamacchia). so really the most you would need is 20 characters per card, assuming you got all Saltalamacchias and Grudzielaneks and Pierzynskis. 120 divided by 20 is 6 so you can easily tweet a 6 card pack rip. Here's the characters per card you'd have for various pack sizes:

4 cards: 30 characters per card
5 cards: 24 characters per card
6 cards: 20 characters per card
8 cards: 15 characters per card
10 cards: 12 characters per card
12 cards: 10 characters per card
15 cards: 8 characters per card
20 cards: 6 characters per card

Jumbo packs are obviously untweetable. Hobby Upper Deck packs are impossible as well unless you just post the card numbers. A six or eight card pack though? perfect. What's in that pile on my desk? 8 card Heritage, 6 card O-Pee-Chee, some 12 card Topps, and soon to be a whole CRAPLOAD of 6 card Allen & Ginter.

It... Could... WOOOORK!

So I wrote up a mock tweet using that Heritage pack.

09 Heritage Target
19 characters, no problem.

383 David Wright 308 Zach Greinke 351 Ben Sheets 381 Braves Team 431 Jason Bartlett SP 344 Rafael Furcal 389 World Series game 4 162 BJ Upton
Eek, 141 characters, too many. Let's kill those first names.

383 Wright 308 Greinke 351 Sheets 381 Braves Team 431 Bartlett SP 344 Furcal 389 WS game 4 162 BJ Upton
103 characters. You know who all those guys are right? We have some space left so let's add a hashtag so the whole world can easily look at my packs.

#packrip
Seven characters to spare. I can add "poopie" to the end if I wish. But I won't. This is entirely too silly as it is.

So now I can tweet my pack rips and save time for more important things. Like typing up my Twitter methodology for an hour. Feel free to steal the concept or call the nuthouse on me if you wish.

Video - cheap Wal Mart blister packs

Sorry about the lighting on this one, I thought I could successfully film at late afternoon but apparently not. I've added actual card scans to the video for the first time to make up for the poor quality. The packs turned out to be better than expected.



Best card in the bunch? This one here:


Not bad for a couple of discount junkers.

The best pack of Heritage I have ripped all year

I've ripped maybe 25 or so packs of Heritage this year. Since packs have been harder for me to come by this year I've documented pretty much all of them in case I needed some fodder for the blog. I've gone over the packs 've opened and I have determined that this retail pack from Target has been the best I've opened this year. There's no big hit, no short prints but if I could only keep one of those packs I've gotten so far this would be the one.

100 Jair Jurrjens

318 Evan Longoria

310 Mike Lowell

53 Adam Jones

TME-AR Alex Rodriguez

296 Mike Pelfrey

299 Daric Barton

215 Bobby Cox

The Braves bookends are pretty good themselves, but Longoria and the Mayo (my first or second at the time if I recall correctly) push it over the top. No SP in the pack, but who needs SP's anyway with the base cards are so bright and colorful. Next year's '61 Heritage set is going to be a shock with its muted colors and minimalist design. Ah well. I wonder if Topps will do the MVP subset from the '61 set? That would be pretty sweet. Good pack here and there's still room for improvement. I'll keep trying to top this one.

Catching up on trades - Motherscratching the surface

I had to post this simply because my final score on the quiz, 88.5, is also my favorite radio station. That's like, synchronicity or something. (which will also help on #82) A couple more hints: no misogyny, and know your Eagles.To attempt to tie an '80s music quiz in with a card blog, here's a pack I got from Motherscratcher, recent WINNAR of the Turk-Off.

MEGAMETAL

Robert plant was the only card I could post on this blog, the rest were just TOO METAL. I'll try to post 'em up on A Pack To Be Named Later, um, later. I also got a few other packs including these:

The Stadium Club will be opened on A Pack A Day. Maybe tonight, maybe tomorrow. Who can tell? I got a whole freakin' BOX for stuff from The Dude, so there will be future Motherscratcher trade catch-up posts. Including... THE UGLIEST JERSEY CARD IN THE WORLD. Well, maybe not the ugliest ever, but it's still not attractive. Thanks MS!