2015 Topps Allen & Ginter - Blaster #2

If I had opened this box first I would have been happy with it because it had 2 each of Phillies and Astros base cards. But overall, it's got a smaller number of inserts than the other box. One really great thing - there were no duplicates of cards from the first box. In my history of buying mulitple blasters at the same time, I think that has happened never before. Here's some of the cards I like from the 2nd box.

2015 Topps Allen & Ginter #269 Jeremy Roenick

Another of the very few non-baseball player cards I pulled. This guy played for the Blackhawks, the Coyotes, the Flyers, the Kings and the Sharks. I couldn't tell you which jersey he's wearing here except it's not the Flyers.

2015 Topps Allen & Ginter Starting Points #65 Maikel Franco

There are 5 Phillies in this insert set and now I have 3 of them.

2015 Topps Allen & Ginter #273 Cole Hamels

I pulled this card while I was watching Hamels throw the first no-hitter of his career last Saturday, blanking the Cubs. And just for old times sake, Ryan Howard hit a 3-run homer. For just a minute there I thought it was 2008 again. Hamels will probably be playing for somebody else by the end of the week but he went out on a high note.

2015 Topps Allen & Ginter Menagerie of the Mind #18 Mermaid

My daughter loves mermaids so this card is for her.

2015 Topps Allen & Ginter #39 Jonathan Singleton

As well as the Astros have been doing this year, Singleton has been a disappointment.

2015 Topps Allen & Ginter A World Beneath our Feet #15 Tsetse Fly

Hey, baseball cards with bugs on them. At least I didn't pull the Madagascar Spitting Cockroach.

2015 Topps Allen & Ginter #179 Manny Machado

I was pretty far into the second box before I pulled my first horizontal card. I was beginning to think Topps had dropped them this year.

2015 Topps Allen & Ginter What Once Was Believed #10 Geocentric Solar System

The good old days.

2015 Topps Allen & Ginter Keys to the City #10 Empire State Building

This is at least the third Allen & Ginter set to feature the Empire State Building. At least they used a different photo for each card.

2015 Topps Allen & Ginter Mini A and G Back #285 Ichiro Suzuki

I don't know why but apparently this is the first Topps set to feature Ichiro since 2012.

2015 Topps Allen and Ginter - First Blaster

Last Friday I posted the first card from the first of two blasters I bought. Let's look at the rest of the cards, in the order I pulled them from the box. I'm not going to post every card, just what I find interesting.

#170 Chris Davis

The first thing I noticed about this card was Davis' soul-searching stare. Then I noticed that the border and logo are gray. The Doug Fister card I featured last Friday had a blue border. 

2015 Spear Topps Allen & Ginter Ancient Armory #18

Third card in and my first insert. I pulled 2 cards from this 20-card set.

2015 Topps Allen & Ginter Mini A and G Back #59 Hector Rondon

Fourth card in and my first mini, and it's an A&G Back. As usual, there is a mini in every pack.

Stephen Drew #306

This card has a red (or brown) border and logo. This is the first time that A&G has had multiple colored borders. Blue, gray, and this color are the three used.  All subtle colors and not overdone. I like it.

Buster Olney #34

 The first non-baseball player card came in the second pack. Is Topps de-emphasizing non-baseball base cards this year? I only found 3 in the whole box.

Justin Verlander #15

The first regular mini card came in the second pack.

2015 Topps Allen & Ginter What Once Would Be #1

My second insert came in the third pack. OK, here's my flying car, where's my jet-pack?

2015 Topps Allen & Ginter Mini Black #28 Jayson Werth

In the third pack is a black-bordered mini. Of the 8 minis I got, only 4 were regulars. The other 4 were  3A&G Backs and this one.

2015 Topps Allen & Ginter Starting Points #66 Cole Hamels

There are 100 cards in this insert set and I pulled three of them, 2 of which were Phillies. The other was Jimmy Rollins. So one former Phillie and one soon to be former Phillie. I got no Phillies or Astros base cards in the box.

2015 Topps Allen & Ginter Keys to the City #9 Las Vegas

A 10-card insert. Most of the insert cards seem to have 10 or 20 cards.

Rocky Balboa #258

For some reason, there is a sub-set of actors from the movie "Rocky" as their parts in the movie. This is the second Sylvester Stallone card I've gotten this year (the other was in Panini Americana).

Topps Allen & Ginter Mythological Menaces #1 Loki

A 10-card mini card insert. Remember him from the Thor movies?

2015 Topps Allen & Ginter Menagerie of the Mind #4 Phoenix

A full-sized set of mythological characters. I wonder if there is a Phoenix in the "Keys to the City" insert?

Collin Cowgill #335

In past sets, cards numbered 301-350 were short-prints. I pulled 4 cards in that range. baseballcardpedia.com makes the point that cards 301-350 are not short prints. tradingcarddb.com and beckett.com both say they are. What does Topps say? As near as I can tell, the actively user-hostile Topps website does not have a checklist for A&G available. Since I pulled four from a blaster, I'm inclined to believe they are not short-printed.

I'm pretty happy with the blaster. I pulled a reasonable amount of inserts and parallel cards. The cards themselves are great. I'd say it's my favorite set since they started adding borders in 2009.

Newest Astro - Scott Kazmir

Scott Kazmir was traded by the A's on Thursday to the Astros. He met the Astros in Kansas City on Friday morning and started against the Royals that night. He threw 7 scoreless innings and the Astros beat the Royals 4-0.

Kazmir was the Mets first round draft pick in 2002. He was pretty successful with the Rays and the Angels from 2004-2010.  Nagging injuries finally ended with his being released by the Angels in 2011. He then fell about as far as you can fall in organized baseball, to the independent minor league team the Sugarland Skeeters. Sugarland is a small town outside Houston Texas so at least he was close to home.

But he worked his way back to a 10-9 record with the Indians in 2013 and then a 15-9 record with the A's in 2014 plus a berth on the All-Star team.

He was 5-5 with the A's so far this year with a good ERA of 2.38. The Astros got him for 2 single A minor leaguers. 

The Astros slipped some just before the All-Star break, losing 8 games of a 10-game road trip. But they've been strong since the break, going 6-1.

2015 Topps Allen and Ginter - First Card

I started seeing Allen and Ginter baseball card blog posts two days ago. The cards looked great. I ordered a hobby box on eBay that night. Unable to wait (that 10-year-old in me acting up again), I bought 2 blasters yesterday. Here's the first card from the first pack from the first box

2015 Topps Allen and Ginter #221 Doug Fister

I usually like A&G design, some year's better than other. Right off the bat I'll say that this is one of the better years. I'll have to spend some time comparing it with other years to say more than that. The light blue tracery of the border and the A&G logo bunched in the lower right corner are, so far, both winners for me.

I'll be spending some quality time with these cards over the weekend. Today, I have a date to get my photo taken with Bill Shatner (that's right, Captain Kirk himself) at the Space City Comic Con in Houston.

Does this ever happen to you?

Yesterday I was cataloging and scanning cards from a repack I had bought back in April. I was watching Tuesday's Astros game on MLB.com. I have to watch Astros game a day late because, since I live in the Houston area, they won't show me the games live. So I typically watch the Phillies games live and catch the Astros game the next day.

Anyway, the Astros announcers were discussing trade rumors. They had mentioned that it was doubtful that the Rockies would trade Troy Tulowitzki but that Carlos Gonzales was a possibility. While I'm listening to this I am literally holding this card in my hand.

2012 Topps Update #6

This happens maybe 4-5 times during the baseball season. I'll be working on a card and the player on that card will come up to hit, or make a play or maybe, like in this case, just be mentioned.

By the way, the Astros beat the Red Sox 8-3.

Movie Review: Ant-Man

From the makers of Raid!

io9.com opened it's review of "Ant-Man" by saying that the movie is a perfectly competent superhero movie as though that was some king of insult.  If you've seen the trailers then you know something about the story but, I'm happy to say, the trailers didn't give the whole movie away like they did for "Terminator Genisys".

The trailers mostly seemed to focus on the the comedy of the movie which was good because there is are some good comedy bits in the film. Paul Rudd (who plays Scott Lang, the Ant-Man when he's in civvies) is primarily a comedian.  The plot mostly holds together. It's an origin story cast as a heist movie. If you're a fan of the Marvel movie universe you've already packed your disbelief in permanent suspension so that won't be a problem.

My wife, daughter (the Marvel Universe expert in our family) and I saw it over the weekend. The theater was pretty crowded and it sounded like everyone was having a great time. And so did we. My daughter's only real problem with the movie is that it wasn't "Avengers: Civil War". 

Speaking of the Avengers, stick through to the very end. There are two Easter eggs in the final mile-long credits. The one at the very end is from "Civil War". By the way "Ant-Man will return".

Paul Rudd was very engaging as Scott and as Ant-Man when he opens his helmet. Mike Douglas (as Hank Pym) does a good turn as the frustrated super genius. There is a great scene early in the movie which takes place in 1989 between Pym and some shadowy group composed of Tony Stark's father and Peggy Carter (just the first of many Avengers tie-ins) and another guy that Pym punches in the nose. Douglas either has the greatest makeup in the history of movie making or his 1989 face is entirely CG. I'm voting on CG. As an aside, Paul Rudd told an absolutely funny story about working with Mike Douglas on the Tonight Show, which, as this is a family blog, I can't repeat. I'm sure you can find it on YouTube.

There are some not entirely successful attempts to put some humanity into the picture. Scott has just gotten out of jail for playing Robin Hood against a powerful corporation and goes to his daughter's birthday party without clearing it with either his ex or her finance. The scenes between Scott and little Cassie are cute but I don't see how he could have had much of a relationship with her considering he's been in prison for awhile and she's like 5 years old. Scott gives Cassie a "Hideous Rabbit" which talks. Way at the end of the credits we learn that Hideous Rabbit was voiced by Tom Kerry who has a ton of credits in TV cartoons, including SpongeBob SquarePants.

The other father-daughter relationship is between Pym and his daughter Hope (Evangeline Lilly). Early hints of discord (she is working for the man who stole Pym Industries away from her father) resolve into her grudgingly helping him. We learn about some Ant-Man back-story eventually which looks like an eventual spin-off. Lilly is pretty good, and she gets a chance to smack Rudd around a bit.

Corey Stoll (who comes from the TV show Homeland, which I've never seen) plays genius company-stealing and former Pym assistant Darren Cross with enough bug-eyed intensity to convince us he's a bad guy even before we get shown he is.

"Guardians of the Galaxy" came out of nowhere and turned out to be pretty good. The same happens here.

Pitchers with 4 Strikeouts in 1 Inning

That's what I was talking about in yesterday's post. A Facebook friend had posted it as a baseball trivia question.

I'm sure you know how this can happen. A batter with two strikes swings at a pitch that the catcher does not field cleanly. The batter is allowed to attempt first base and is safe unless he is tagged out before reaching the bag. The pitcher is awarded a strikeout, but an out is not recorded. The pitcher then goes on to strike out the side.

The last time it happened was in back-to-back Dodgers games this season.

On May 15, Jansen struck out Carlos Gonzalez of the Rockies on a passed ball. Gonzales then stole second. Jansen then struck out Hendley, Stubbs and LeMehiue on 10 pitches. The Dodgers went on to win the game 6-4, giving Kershaw his 2nd win of the season.

On May 16, Sanchez, who was then with the Dodgers but is now with the Yankees, struck out LeMehiue on a wild pitch. He then threw a wild pitch to Gonzalez allowing LeMehiue to move to second. Gonzalez then singled and Arenado hit a 3-run homer. Sanchez, the damage done, proceeded to strike out the next three batters. The Dodgers lost this game 7-1, Zack Greinke's first loss of the season.

I'm curious why there was a 40-year gap in 4-strikeout innings? A change in rules perhaps?

I was going to feature the last time a Phillie had done this but apparently a Phillie pitcher has never done it.

Not many pitchers have done this twice, but Zack Greinke, not has only done it twice but once in each league. He did it in 2014 with the Dodgers and once in 2012 with the Angels.

The last American League pitcher to do this was Anibal Sanchez in 2013.

He did it in the first inning of the first game of the ALDS against the Red Sox. He struck out Ellsbury to start the inning, the struck out Victorino with a wild pitch. Victorino stole 2nd and Pedroia walked. Sanchez then struck out Ortiz and Napoli and went on to win the game 1-0. There had not been a 4-strikeout inning in a playoff game since Orval Overal of the Cubs did it in 1908. Overal was 2-0 in the 1908 World Series, helping the Cubs to win their second World Series in as many years.

One final note, Chuck Finley has managed to do this three times, twice with the Angels (both in 1999) and with the Indians in 2000.

You can find the full list here. Box score information courtesy of baseball-reference.com.