2013 Fantasy Baseball League + Topps Series 1

You probably didn't notice so I'll point it out right now. With the release of 2013 Topps Series 1, I decided to go ahead and start the ball rolling on the Fantasy Baseball League I'll be running through Yahoo. I added a new tab at the top of the page that has a bunch of the rules (mostly a recap of my intitial post but a little more formalized), the plan for prizes and a running tab of readers/fellow bloggers who committed to join.

I also went ahead and used my buy-in money to pick up a blaster from Wal-mart:

So click the tab at the top and if you're interested, leave a comment and I'll add you to the list. 

It was tough to not pick up a blaster for myself but I'm going to try to go about my collecting a little differently this year. I went ahead and bought my Cubs team set from a pre-sale on ebay. In an effort to save a little bit of money, I'm going to test my willpower and hold out for the inevitable price reduction to build my set. I prefer hand collating the sets which is still pretty pricey compared to buying a factory sealed one but we'll see how it goes. Last year's Series 1 hobby boxes can be had for about half the original price. Sure I'll miss out on wrapper redemptions and code cards but I've never really done those anyway.

There is a big card show near me in March (or maybe April this year?) so I'm going to try to hold out at least until then. Hopefully even until Series 2 drops in June. We'll see!

That's not to say I'm not interested in your Cubs parallels!

I did already cave and bought one jumbo pack just to tide me over though. Any non-Cubs posted below are available for grabs.

As stated on the package, I pulled 3 of the blue bordered parallels. All horizontal cards and you know how much I like those! When I first saw the base card design, I was a little skeptical of how they would translate to a horizontal design but they are much better than I expected.

I couldn't find the odds on the jumbo pack for the Emerald parallels but I did pull one. They are 1:6 hobby packs though.

These Chasing History cards seem to be part of the same series so I don't know why the Willie Mays is vertical and the Hanley Ramirez and Frank Robinson are horizontal. 

This was a Josh Reddick hot pack. The gold card is numbered out of 2013 and is a 1:5 pack pull. Nothing extra special about the Chasing the Dream card although there are apparently autographed versions of these inserts.

There are 6 Cubs with base cards in Series 1 but I didn't pull any of them. I did however, manage to pull one of the inserts, a 1972 Mini Anthony Rizzo. I'll take that.

And the only base card worth noting (unless I somehow missed an SP because I haven't figured those out yet) was a Jake Odorizzi rookie. He came through the Carolina League two seasons ago with the Wilmington Blue Rocks so we saw him play against the Potomac Nationals. I have no feelings one way or the other for the Royals but its always nice to see these guys from A ball make it to the show. I think I have a Pro Debut signed by him but I'll have to go back and look.

I do like the Career Chase line added to the backs of the card just below the personal statistics. However, this one on Odorizzi's card is a little on the ridiculous side:

 With 4 strikeouts, Odorizzi is 5710 away from Nolan Ryan's all-time record of 5,714.

Also, no 2012 MLB stats on the card? Just minor leagues? Where did those 4 K's come from?

On the other hand, they got Tyler Clippard's just plain wrong. Topps claims Mariano Rivera's save record is 575. You can see by the Brian Wilson I posted for comparison, the current record is 608. Not only that, but Clippard's total of "33" plus "519 saves away" adds up to 552? Yeah, yeah, I know. From yesterday's post, I'm one to complain about Topps mistakes, right?

If you made it this far, I'll remind you again: Go check out the Fantasy League!