2014 Bowman base cards

When 2012 Bowman came out I praised the set for finally doing away with the black and red theme that the cards had had for over 10 years.  We're on the 3rd year now of the 'new and improved' Bowman look. As with the past 2 years, the Bowman set features weird photo border effects and white card borders.

I like the new logo, a very smart Bowman B in a baseball. They use the single B logo sparingly, the last time was 2005, the time before was 1994. The foil team logo placed center bottom is good. I mostly like the photo border, very flowing and in the team color like the past few years. I'm not quite sure what the branching items up each side are supposed to be. Arteries? There is also a little saddle thing under the team logo. Kind of pointless.

I never like silver foil on black, but they've had it 3 years running. Maybe I'm just getting old but the team and player names on the front are small and hard to read. 

The photography is bright, but as they've done on the past two years, the backgrounds are blurred out. I think that's OK on some photos, but not on every one.

I think the backs are an improvement over the past 2 years. Not radically different, but I like the use of color for the stat line. I also prefer the white border over the gray from last year's. The player and team names are easy to read and the card number stands out well.

It took me a bit longer than maybe it should have to figure out what was going on in the lower corners. It's a blurred out continuation of the photo.

I bought two blasters and 2 3-packs (to get the purple parallels). Of the 236 cards, only 100 of them were base cards. Nearly all the cards feature a pitcher pitching or a batter batting. There were 4 cards featuring a fielding play,

four cards featuring a base runner,

one card featuring a player on base,

(Mike Trout shaking dirt out of his ear), and one card featuring a catcher,

and no posed shots, or dugout shots or plays at base or home. 90% of the cards look pretty similar due to the sparsity of fielding plays.

As is usual for Bowman, there are no subset cards (like Leaders, All-Star, etc) unless you count the Rookie cards as a subset (which I don't).

Also, the fact that there were only 100 base cards of the 230 cards (much less than half) will probably be distressing for some. There are 220 cards in the set so completing a set by buying retail would be pretty difficult. It's not a problem for me, since I collect for diversity of cards. The bulk of the rest of the cards were either the Prospect cards (44) or Prospect Chrome cards (41). The rest of the cards were mostly various parallel cards. There are only a few actual insert cards. I also pulled 2 prospect autos, one from a blaster the other from a 3-pack.

I'll have another post up with the parallels and inserts later.