Gardening Supplies and Discounted Cards!

The family and I had to run out to get mulch, grass seed, and some miscellaneous supplies for the yard the other day. Instead of going to Lowe's for said items, we hit Meijer, the grocery store across the street, which has a good sized garden center. If you've never heard of Meijer, think of it as a super-clean Wal-Mart with friendly employees. While we were there, we were browsing the toy section and I happened upon the small card section that looked like it hadn't been updated in a while. I dug through and found these rack packs for $2.99 each.

The best cards of the O-Pee-Chee bunch. Some pretty basic stuff but there's some interesting things to check out. First, I had no clue Matt Holliday ever played for Oakland so it's really weird to see him in an A's jersey. In the second row, I'm pretty surprised that Wily Mo Pena was still kicking around in 2009. He was a can't miss power hitter coming up in the Reds organization but got shipped off to Boston for Bronson Arroyo in one of the better trades the Reds did in the past decade. I also don't remember Jeff Samardzija playing with the Cubs during this time but it's obviously pre-"Shark" days. 

Moving on to the Upper Deck cards. The packs were relatively the same, except for the inserts. Some of these I'll keep, some of these are going in the trade box. The one major complaint I have about these cards is that the name and team is really hard to heard because of the shiny foil (and also the small print). I dare you to find the team name on the Wesley Wright card (bottom left).

As I mentioned, there were inserts and yeah ... not a big fan of these inserts as they are way too busy for my liking, regardless of who it is.

Another one of the insert sets was the Yankee Stadium tribute set. I like the idea behind it plus you get cards of hall of famers, both current and long dead.

Here's a final look at some more of the base cards. Again, I'd forgotten that Darin Erstad played for Houston, or that Dave Roberts played for the Giants. That's what made opening these packs fun, the fact that it's form a time period relatively recent but still further enough off in the past to warrant a reaction from stuff you don't remember at all.

Oh, and if you're curious, we did get the mulch, grass seed, and other items we went there to originally planned.