April in the D

Lot of goings ons around here lately and there is nothing like an afternoon of watching Rick Porcello pitch BP to the Texas Rangers to get me in the mood to catch everybody up. These are in no particular order.....


1. Made a trip up to Milwaukee to catch the Tigers last official Spring Training appearance. Yeah, the one where they gave up four runs in the bottom of the 9th to lose to the Brewers, 13-12. It was a great trip regardless. All seats were $10, first come first served, and I ended up sitting about 10-12 rows behind the Tigers dugout. There's a pic of Zumaya from my seats.


2. Made a trip over to Detroit to catch the Tigers play the Indians the first Saturday of the season. Bonderman looked fantastic that afternoon and the Tigers won 4-2 on an absolutely beautiful day. The weather was so nice I ended up getting a sunburn! This pic is the last out of the game.


3. I picked up an overpriced Topps team set at Comerica Park. I know you can get these at Meijer or Target for half of what you pay in the park, but I was already there, it was already there......what the hell. $4 is not going to break my budget. HOWEVER, I did end up stopping in Meijer on the way back to see if they had any caps or other Tiger stuff that I couldn't live without, and lo and behold there were the team sets. With a difference though. It looks like the fancy, high priced set you get at the park has a FREE COLLECTOR CASE (they bolded it first, not me....) as opposed to the retail version which does not.

So now I have two of them. Which is not a bad thing. I've been picking up these little team sets all over the country for the last 3 years and I have them in their own binder. I'll put one set in there and the other one in my 2010 Tigers binder. It does make me wonder though why there are two different types. Even though I can't put my finger on it, I'm sure Topps is screwing somebody over. I always am.....


4. I was in Target yesterday, and I've noticed plenty of times those bricks of cards that you can get for $5 that guarantee there are at least $10 worth of cards inside, or something like that. I saw that there was one that had two bricks, half filled with cards and half filled with Topps coins. I grabbed on of those, and a couple of the $4 "mixed bag" blister packs that make the same claim.


It made for some fun opening to get home and see what all was in those grab bags. I ended up with a complete '90 Topps/Kmart Superstars set (33 cards, no Tigers), 60 '90 Topps coins (interestingly enough, I got exactly two each of thirty different coins, including two of Alan Trammell), 3 rack packs of '89 Topps, 1 rack pack of '87 Topps, an '81 Fleer Dale Murphy, a '90 Post Cereal Nolan Ryan, and a some other crap. (Like a '95 Pinnacle Tony Phillips) It was certainly more fun than shelling out the same amount of $$$ for a few rack packs of Topps Heritage.

Oh well, not much else going on around here lately. I nabbed '81 & '82 Topps stickers sets off ebay a few weeks ago. Come to think of it, that'll give me something to discuss later on this week.