Allen & Ginter

For roughly the past month, I have been counting down the days until July 23. No, I wasn't planning an awesome spring vacation to North Carolina, and no I'm not headed to college early, I am just counting down the days until 2008 Allen & Ginter is released.

Phew, no laughs, thank god this is a baseball card blog.

Since Andy and I work minimum wage jobs and have to fund ourselves through college, neither of us can afford to buy any high end product (although I bought a box of SPX anyways). So, we both look for sets that offer an awesome looking product, great inserts, a set that isn't paralleled out its ass, and awesome random shit. Therefore, Allen & Ginter wins the title of the best set ever. Each year the set looks identical to the previous year, with the player photo looking as though it was hand drawn on a cream colored, standard looking card. The set has numerous mini sets (literally), including the 50 card subset with a player representing each state (Tim Stauffer must be thrilled to have a baseball card again), and a 50 card subset of famous world leaders (awesome). Oh, you can pull your standard jersey or bat card, but you can also pull awesome shit such as a Ray "Boom Boom" Mancini boxing glove card, among others. Basically, Allen & Ginter has everything I want in a set.

So, when July 23 came it took me less then a day to get to our card store and crack me some cases. The guy who owns the place is awesome, and isn't your typical dealer who will crack boxes until he has the case hit, then sell the excess to his customers. He cracked a new case infront of us, and I slowly pulled the three boxes I wanted.

The first case was my best, I pulled Victor Martinez and Tim Hudson jersey cards, a Paul LoDuca bat card, the Battle of Gettysburg crack the code card, numerous hilarious cards like Harriet Tubman and Marie Curie, and a Francisco Cordero mini autograph redemption card.

The second case had my biggest pull, a Lisa Leslie autograph, which I was initially pissed about since I thought it would be worth nothing. I also got another set of Tim Hudson and Victor Martinez jersey cards (!!!yay!!!), and a Don Larsen crack the code card.

The third and final case was my worst, I only pulled a Rafael Furcal and Albert Pujols jersey and bat cards, but I did get a Bill Mazeroski crack the code and a Rich Hill 10/25 bazooka back card.

Overall, my three cases rocked. I came up only 37 cards short of base set, 5 State cards short of the state set, and got two cards (Leslie & Hill) which I pulled zero of last year. So, I was satisfied with my 270 dollars being well spent, and was planning on keeping everything I got. However, when I check ebay and saw that a Leslie auto was selling for 59.99, I put her bitch as in a case an put it up on ebay. If anyone reads this blog (doubtful), here's the link: http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=300245567460. I'm hoping to just get 50 for her, which will be half of a future box which I will likely get, and hopefully pull an awesome rip card in and keep the cycle going. I don't know, I'll be updating later with results.