Game 73 - Saturday Afternoon, June 21st in St. Louis
Record - 34-39, 4th Place, 4 games behind the Nationals
One Sentence Summary: The Phillies and Cole Hamels couldn't overcome a three-run eighth inning as the Cardinals won, 4-1.
What It Means: It means the modest five-game winning streak is over.
What Happened: Hamels was basically cruising until the eighth inning, when he walked Matt Carpenter to start the inning and then Matt Holliday doubled Carpenter home. Adam Wainwright held the Phillies to just six hits, and the Phillies' sole extra-base hit came from Hamels who doubled in the fifth.
Featured Card: One of my Father's Day gifts arrived a few days ago in a small rectangular white box from Topps.
If you're on the Topps mailing list, you know by now that the company is attempting to branch out into other baseball-related collectibles, including t-shirts, wall art, and something they're calling "Archives Collections," which is essentially a team-specific flea market haul in a box. None of these new offerings caught my eye until I received an e-mail from Topps advertising 60th Anniversary team sets using the design from the 1955 baseball card set.Each five-card team set is numbered to 99 and comes in a wax pack wrapper for the low, low (not really) price of $24.99. The 5 x 7 Phillies cards are printed on "vintage trading card stock" and feature Hamels, Ryan Howard, Cliff Lee, Jimmy Rollins and Chase Utley. I forwarded the e-mail to my wife, noting that this set actually interested me, and she was kind enough to order me a set for Father's Day.
The cards are definitely cool, but I don't feel like I received something that's actually worth $24.99. My Phillies team set is hand numbered as the 14th set out of 99, and I was very surprised (and disappointed) to learn that the cards were blank-backed.
Either the person packing up these cards felt guilty for charging us $24.99 for five pieces of cardboard, or the Topps quality control department is asleep again, since there was a second pack of these cards literally stuck to the pack I opened. I haven't decided what to do with this second pack yet, and it will remain unopened for the time being. My guess is that it's either set #13 or set #15, and I'll either ship it to a fellow Phillies baseball card collector or save it to give to my oldest son Doug on a rainy day.
(That being said, let me know if you're reading this and if you're interested in a trade. Doug thought the cards were cool, but he's more into the Topps Archives cards these days.)
Not that we'd likely find out the resolution to this, but I wonder what happens when the rightful owner of #13 or #15 says "Hey, where the heck are my cards?" How would Topps go about rectifying it? If they refund the money, then they have an unhappy customer, but if they reprint, then they'll have two identically-numbered sets floating out there.
ReplyDeleteOn the plus side, it's nice to know that Topps can still do wax wrappers, even if it's just for specialty products.
I hadn't thought of that, and hopefully Topps just sends along set #16 to whoever ordered right after my wife did. My thought was that Topps was going to have an accounting issue when it realizes it only sold 98 of the 99 Phillies team sets.
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