NOW I know how it feels

I just got back from Le French Boutique Tar-get, spent almost a hundred bucks on various food and sundry items, most of it going to my daughter. Damn babies are expensive. Anyway, when I go to Target I get to purchase packs as my special reward for being a good Daddy, as I did last week, today I bought one pack of Topps Series 2 (meh, except for a Presidential Campaign Card of Reagan v. Carter), a pack of Topps Chrome (damn, those blue Chrome cards do look nice) and a pack of Bowman. It was in the last pack that I got a hit, A Certified Scout's Autograph of Dan Ontiveros.

Yup, I beat the odds and pulled a 1:490 insert card. I should be jumping up and down for joy right? Except that I could care less about this guy, and only the truly insane master-set collectors would care about this set. I'm all for recognizing truly fine achievements in sports, but come on, SCOUTS? Do I really give a shit? Not only that, making it an extremely hard pull is fucking pointless. Make them just like the other shitty inserts, who cares if they're autographed. I wouldn't be surprised if this was the first time that ANY of these scouts got paid for their autograph, and what did they pay them anyway? I know players are paid a decent amount for their sigs by the card companies (I suppose), but don't you think that Topps must have gotten these guys for the cheap? Maybe MLB went to Topps and said, hey, we'll cut you some slack for having a license that is declining in value each and every year while we raise the price of said license each and every year, and we'll GIVE you guys 100 autographs from each one of our Major League Scouts. Some card designer said "Hey I can make a cool insert set with a map on it and some pushpins" and the worst autograph set imaginable was created.

Actually, I take that back, I can think of a worse Baseball autograph insert set - Mascots.

I'll probably redeem it anyway, sometimes they screw up and send something better. Sometimes not. There's only one on eBay right now (I stole the picture above from that auction) and it's a BIN from a store for five bucks. If I could get five bucks for this card, I'd take it. Hell, if I could get a nice Vlad Guerrero base card from a high end set, I take it for trade.

While I was doing a little research for the item above, I found this: Topps and some baby DVD company have teamed up to create and distribute special edition cards of current MLBers as Babies. Now, I have a 21 month old, and she's adorable. I'd love to get some cards made up for her, and I probably will at some point, it's not that tough, both UD and Topps have custom card programs. BUT, just because I want a trading card with my daughter as a baby doesn't mean I want one with David Ortiz as a baby, though he wasn't a bad looking kid to be honest.

No doubt this will piss off Topps collectors even more, because you get ONE card with each DVD, which will cost $20 undoubtedly, and they're in the 2008 Set Design, so they must belong to the 2008 Master Set right?

Actually it kind of pisses me off that they're only releasing certain teams right now, starting with the Yankees, Mets, Red Sox and Dodgers. Where's my frackking Angels? I would love to see what Vlad Guerrero looked like as a kid. Do you think he had dreads?