Goodwin Champions 3 Pack Review

I managed to pick up 3 retail packs of the Goodwin Champs cards today.  I’ve seen a few posts on these but haven’t really read them, I have just been looking at the scans.  My initial thought on these were they were a cheap knock off of the A&G set.  I thought that about the Obak set too, but I found out that Obak had a little more to offer than I had first expected.  Unfortunately with this set, I was dead on.  I maybe even gave them too much credit when comparing it to A&G.  With out further ado………..

Pack 1

Right off the bat I pulled the one and only card I’ve seen that I wanted, Ichiro.  The Thome is nice too.  I like the use of the sunset behind him. It almost symbolizes were he is at in his great career, except he’s a Dodger now and that might be a sunrise.  The first impression of these cards I have is not overwhelming.  It feels like I’ve seen this set done a couple times already and done better.

Pack 2

This pack just completely pissed me off!  I mean, whoo hoo I got a black bordered mini of Kinsler, that’s cool, but c’mon, what the hell is the rest of this pack?  The first card, if you can even call it a card, has to be the worst card of the worst set ever produced.  I hope whoever came up with this idea for a set has since been fired and never allowed to work in the trading card industry ever again.  I don’t know who the guy is on this card, I am too lazy to try and figure it out, and I don’t care, but apparently he is responsible for our 401k’s getting flushed down the crapper.  Do we really need a card telling us we had a financial crisis in 2008?  Apparently Upper Deck should start collecting their own cards so they would get this little nugget of informative history.  Maybe if there is a crisis, you shouldn’t charge $2.00 for a pack of  four cards and include this shit as one of them.  The next card I love too.  If it weren’t for the (Thoroughbred Race Horse) next to Smarty Jones, I would of never have guessed what this was.  Really, it’s a horse!  Thanks for spelling that one out for me Upper Deck.  I thought it was a caribou ’till I read that.  If I was trying to put this set together I would have been even more pissed.  The only full sized card I pulled was of a horse.  Who wants to go back and buy another pack after that hoof to the nuts?

Pack 3

This pack is better than pack 2, but nothing to really get excited over.  I got a Jr. of a Jr. card.  I like the Ford card too, but it looks a little out-of-place when sitting next to the rest of the cards.  They should have decided to go with all paintings or all photo’s.  My vote would have been for paintings.  Can Johan really pitch from the tree tops like that?  He really is amazing!

My overall verdict is this set sucks.  It may have gotten a higher rating if it had not been for pack 2.  It also doesn’t help that there are two other sets that feel real similar to this that have been out for a while now.  It’s stuff like this that doesn’t bother me that UD won’t be around much longer in the game of baseball.  I don’t understand how they can put out such a top quality flagship series year after year and just flat out fail when trying to do these retro type sets.  Hopefully next year we start seeing some new sets and less rehashes of 100-year-old sets over and over again.

If God Was A Woman

Click on the picture for the full show!

She would be getting one hell of a show!

At Least He Still Has His Hot Sauce

40 year old David Race of Ohio recently tied the world record score of 3,333,360 on Pac-Man, once held by 2008 A&G cardholder and hot sauce mogul, Billy Mitchell, only he did it almost 2 hours faster and 42 seconds faster than Billy’s best friend and former record holder, Chris Ayra.  That’s right, in 3 hours, 41 minutes, and 22 seconds Mr. Race managed to devour every dot, bonus fruit, and blue ghost in every one of 256 levels of Pac-Man.  And people think we’re silly for collecting baseball cards!

“Obak” To Business

I apologize for the horrible pun, but I want to get back to baseball cards and away from the garbage from the last few days.  While shopping at the local Wally World I was surprised to see a gravity feeder full of packs of Obak.  At first I thought this set was going to be an Allen & Ginter knockoff full of minor leaguers.  After buying three packs I realize this set is so much more.  The first thing that surprised me was I only pulled two current minor leaguers from the three packs.

I pulled Atlanta’s #1 prospect Jason Heyward and Texas Rangers prospect and Matt Wieters high school teammate Justin Smoak.  I was kind of excited because I have actually heard of both of these guys.  The rest of the cards were what really got me interested in this set.

I now am the proud owner of a card featuring Gregg Jefferies doing some sort of rain dance.  By the looks of the clouds in the background it’s working.  I also pulled a great card of Project ’62’s favorite Ryne Sandberg.  Who’d a thunk that in 2009 I would buy a pack of baseball cards and pull a Gregg Jefferies and a Ryne Sandberg card?  Not me that’s for sure.  The rest of the cards are a bit of a history lesson of the minor leagues.

I now realize there are baseball facts I don’t know, but should know.  The first is about the guy on the first card, Ron Necciai.  This is my new favorite card of a guy I have never heard of.  Apparently back in 1952, Ron struck out 27 batters in a 9 inning game.  I’m no mathematician, but I think that means every out was made by a strike out.  Pretty damn impressive!  The second card features a young Wesley Rickey, better known as Branch Rickey.  I knew he was responsible for signing Jackie Robinson and breaking the color barrier that stood strong for many years.  What I did not know was that he was a pro ball player in the early 1900’s and he also created the framework for the modern minor league farm system. Here are the scans of the rest of the cards.

They include the inventor of baseball, the guy they named that one trophy after, and a women who played minor league ball in the ’30’s who once struck out Ruth and Gehrig in an exhibition game.  Who knew?

Here you go MattR……

I Crown Thee, King Of The Douce Baggery

No, not you Dick.

If you don’t know my history with the Beckett website or it’s message board members you can catch up HERE, HERE, and HERE.  Most of the members are great and helpful people, but there seems to be a couple of them who go out of their way to be assholes.

The short and curly of it is that I’ve had issues with a couple of members causing one of them to turn me in for “spamming” and creating more than one account.  One of them was The CardboardFan.  He turned out to be a pretty cool guy and after this whole fiasco, I probably owe him a small apology.  The other member is known as RiceLynnEvans75.  It turns out that not only is he a dick, he is also a huge pole, hypocrite and a bit of a liar.

If you have visited this site lately you would have noticed a couple of assholish comments left by “Jake McComb”.  He doesn’t like me very much, but he must be a huge fan of the site because he has visited it a couple of dozen times in the last couple of days.  He leaves a comment and then checks back until I come up with something new to say back.  I thought I would entertain him and devote a whole post to him.  The only problem is that he isn’t him.  What I mean is, Jake McComb is really RiceLynnEvans75, who’s real name is actually Bill.  My question is why disguise yourself?  Why, when asked the question “Were the Beckett boards down again?” you make the statement “Beckett boards are useless. I wouldn’t know.”  That’s a flat out lie, not the useless part but the part about you not knowing, you of all people should know, you are just over 1,700 post on the old Beckett boards, including your latest display of jackassery.  HERE. Do you practice being a dick or does it just come naturally?  You drip with hypocrisy. You claim you hate spam, yet here you are bombarding me with unwanted and unnecessary comments.  You turn me in for creating a second account and turn around and pretend to be someone else when leaving me comments.  You weasel.  Own up to it and call me out by who you really are.  Did you really think I wouldn’t figure out it was you?  See, when you are as big of an asshole as you seem to be, people line up to sell you out.  You might want to check some of your good buddies over on the Beckett boards.  They were all to friendly to help me connect the dots.  I know it’s you, I know your real name, I know your IP address, I know your email address, which, by the way, is not sumone28@yahoo.com, I even know the city in which you live.  Go ahead and hide behind “Jake McComb” if you want.  I’ll be here, hiding behind nothing, eagerly awaiting your response.  Just remember there are no Mods to run to on here.  I run this shit.  So continue your shenanigans, you will only slowly reveal who you really are.  The King Of The Douce Baggery.