Pack Sampling: 2020 Topps Series 2 baseball (Dollar Tree packs)

  

Before jumping into today's post, I just wanted to say thank you to everyone who stopped by on Friday (and Saturday), I'm very grateful to you for doing so. Now that that's out of the way...

I couldn't tell you why exactly, but ever since the Rona started up, my trips to the Dollar Tree have increased ten-fold. Coincidentally, me purchasing cheap crap in recent months has also increased ten-fold. Whether or not today's item falls under the "cheap crap" header will be left up to you to decide, because I don't really know.

I've been hitting up the Dollar Tree, or as the kids call it, the DT, at least once week for months now, and sometimes even twice a week. This is due partly to me finally figuring out which day the new items get put out (it's Tuesday at this particular location), as well as the fact that it was one of the few places that was open there during quarantine. Everything's been opened back up for months now, and yet I still keep going. I think at this point it's more about it having become a habit more than anything else.

It must've been about two weeks ago now that I stopped in on a Monday, then found myself headed in that direction again on Wednesday, and figured that I might as well stop and see if anything new had been put out the day before. There had been a few things put out, but the only one that you'll care about is the baseball cards. In the card area that had had only Fortnite cards (they've been there pretty much all year) two days before, now had a feeder box (I believe that's what they're called) of 2020 Topps series 2. I don't know how many packs come in those things, but there was only about seven of them left, meaning that quite a few had sold in a very short amount of time. I bought three.

It's no secret that I don't care much for current sports happenings, I don't watch games, and only read the occasional recap (I do see plenty of whiny tweets though). I only really care about a couple of current athletes, and that's primarily because I like them as people, more so than because of whatever they're doing in their chosen sport. And unless it's loaded with past greats, I rarely have any interest current card sets. You might be asking yourself then why I would bother buying three packs of something that'd probably end up having nothing of interest to me in them? Easy, I did it for you... and the blog!

A lot of people have been rather upset over the inability to find retail cards since we got the Rona, so the thought was that maybe I'd get lucky and pull three packs worth of good stuff to send out to any, and all, interested parties. And even though I'm not hurting for blog content, $3 is a small price to pay for some different, i.e. contemporary, material. And it might even bring a few new people to the blog, though they'd probably be annoyed at how I'm going to cover this contemporary material, and then rage quit the blog :)

Now that I've typed your ear off, let's see what was in these packs... 

Pack #1:

And just as I thought, I have no idea who any of these kids are. There's probably someone out there yelling at the screen "HOW CAN YOU NOT WHO DREW F'N STECKENRIDER IS?!?!".  There is a rookie in the pack, and "collectors" are all about the rookies these days. Current wisdom says that I should send it in to be graded immediately and then take to the Twitter to brag about my subs(?). Conversely, current Jon wisdom says that it would make much more sense to just send it to Adam (provided he wants young Mr. Nuñez of course), and be done with it. 

The 2020 design has, I'm sure been dissected ad nauseam, so I'll just say that I don't particularly like it, and leave it at that. I'm not feeling the weird angles. 

In recent years, most DT packs usually have an exclusive yellow parallel in each pack, but these don't mention anything about that on the wrapper, and as you can see, clearly don't have any exclusive yellow (or any other color) parallels, they're just regular old 5-card packs.

Pack #2

Hey, I recognize two guys from this pack, Cain and Wong (wasn't that the name of the Rizzoli & Isles spin-off?), and have even seen them play!

Having not owned a lot of Topps in recent years, I was pleasantly surprised to see all of the minor league stats on the back of Victor Reyes' card. I thought that they had stopped doing minor league stats at some point, but maybe not. Looks like Victor's been around too, hopefully he's still in the bigs making the most of his opportunity, that small sampling there from 2019 certainly looked promising (this is where a normal blogger would look up his current stats and provide them for the reader, unfortunately for you, this particular blogger doesn't care enough to do so).

Pack #3

Aaaaand... we're back to five guys that I haven't heard of. I believe this is what you call a Rockies hot pack, in fact 20% of this 3-pack break was Rockies! Is Griffin Canning really a future star? Pitchers seem awfully soft these days, and not very durable. No offense to Griffin, but I don't think that it would be wise to invest in his future starness.

That was pretty exciting, huh? So would these be considered to be good packs? Or are these just the modern equivalent of "junk" wax? I'm leaning towards the latter. They were fun to open though, most things are, but I do have 15 cards here that are needing new homes. Some of these are will be sort of spoken for already, or at least certain people will get the option of first refusal (Adam - Rockies, Kerry - Cardinals, etc.), but they'll still be some leftovers. And I think that it's Tom who collects empty packs, or at least those with Angels on them, so at least one of the wrappers will be set aside for him (if he wants it).

Speaking of "junk" wax, as some bonus content, I stopped in at the printing/copy/card shop down in town yesterday, and left with less money, and a couple of boxes of cards that I really didn't need...

As I said on Twitter, at $6.50 apiece, I just couldn't walk away from them. Oh, and on the subject of Twitter, how is it that a tweet featuring these boxes ends up being the most popular thing that I've done on that site all year? Granted I rarely tweet anymore, not that I ever did a lot of it in the past anyway, but still, my blog post plugs get almost no attention (the ones that I actually remember to plug on there), yet everyone loses their collective minds over these crap boxes. Must be the appeal of the potential Elite's, but even then, I didn't realize that those had gotten so popular with the masses. I wonder if this is just another example of me not knowing what's going on with the current state of collecting?

Thanks for taking a moment to look at my page.