Currently, I am in the midst of my latest Breaker's Club (basically a giant group break that spans multiple weeks with many, many boxes included). Last week was our first week of Breaker's Club and as part of the week one festivities I ripped a box of 2024 Stadium Club (hobby). I'm always happy to "double-dip" group breaks and blog content, so let's use that box for a review box of 2024 Topps Stadium Club!
Each box of 2024 Stadium Club comes with 16 packs with 8 cards per pack. New this year (I think), is the fact that each pack will contain a Chrome Variation card.
Base Cards:
As you'd expect from Stadium Club, there are plenty of nice photographs spread throughout the base set. Here are a few of my favorite base cards from our box:
While the photography is certainly nice (though it is a step back from previous offerings), the collation was definitely NOT top-notch. Out of the 83 base cards, we pulled 10 duplicates (put differently, about 12% of the base cards were duplicates within the box). There's absolutely no excuse for collation that poor within a box, especially for what Topps is charging for boxes of Stadium Club.
Oh yeah, we also found this guy, I heard he's okay:
Parallels:
As I mentioned already, each pack of 2024 Stadium Club contains a Chrome parallel. Our box did produce the expected 16 different Chrome variation cards. I scanned my favorite three:
I do like the Chrome cards but with only 16 per box trying to build the full 300-card Chrome parallel set is probably a fool's errand. At least we got some photographs with the Chrome treatment.
In addition to the regular Chrome cards, you can also expect to pull two Chrome Refractor parallels.
As usual, the Refractor cards look awesome (but again, good luck completing that set)! No complaints about our two pulls, especially that lovely Willie Mays card!
Topps loaded this year's Stadium Club up with parallels (no real surprise that they would do so if you've been following most of the products that Topps has put out this year)! The most common base parallel is the Red Foil parallel - of which we pulled a total of 11 cards of which I scanned my favorite eight cards:
The Red Foil parallels do look pretty cool in person. The red background makes the player photo pop in a way that a regular background often doesn't.
Rounding out the parallels, we found a smattering of other colors including:
Gold: Francisco Alverez
Black: George Kirby
Black & White: Chris Sale
Green Chrome: Dave Winfield
Rainbow Foilboard: Sandy Koufax
Interestingly, only the Sandy Koufax is serially numbered (out of only 25, no less)! For my money, the Koufax is definitely the hit of the box (which I suppose is a bit of a spoiler as to how I felt about our two autographs...we'll get to the signatures in a moment). Before we do though, let's take a quick look at the various inserts in the box.
Inserts:
Topps always crams a bunch of inserts into each edition of Stadium Club but I rarely find most of them engaging. To be honest, I'd prefer to have an extra (non-duplicate) base card in each pack rather than most of the inserts. The one exception, however, is the always cool Triumvirate set. We found the middle card for the Astros' trio:
The Triumvirate cards are die-cut in such a way that they can "fit together" with other cards from the same grouping. Here's the full checklist for the Triumvirate set:
- TRI-1 Mookie Betts, Los Angeles Dodgers
- TRI-2 Shohei Ohtani, Los Angeles Dodgers
- TRI-3 Freddie Freeman, Los Angeles Dodgers
- TRI-4 Alex Bregman, Houston Astros
- TRI-5 Yordan Alvarez, Houston Astros
- TRI-6 Jose Altuve, Houston Astros
- TRI-7 Juan Soto, New York Yankees
- TRI-8 Aaron Judge, New York Yankees
- TRI-9 Jasson Domínguez, New York Yankees
- TRI-10 Matt Olson, Atlanta Braves
- TRI-11 Ronald Acuña Jr., Atlanta Braves
- TRI-12 Spencer Strider, Atlanta Braves
- TRI-13 Manny Machado, San Diego Padres
- TRI-14 Fernando Tatis Jr., San Diego Padres
- TRI-15 Jackson Merrill, San Diego Padres
- TRI-16 Clayton Kershaw, Los Angeles Dodgers
- TRI-17 Shohei Ohtani, Los Angeles Dodgers
- TRI-18 Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Los Angeles Dodgers
- TRI-19 Paul Goldschmidt, St. Louis Cardinals
- TRI-20 Nolan Arenado, St. Louis Cardinals
- TRI-21 Sonny Gray, St. Louis Cardinals
- TRI-22 Evan Carter, Texas Rangers
- TRI-23 Corey Seager, Texas Rangers
- TRI-24 Wyatt Langford, Texas Rangers
- TRI-25 Bo Bichette, Toronto Blue Jays
- TRI-26 Vladimir Guerrero Jr., Toronto Blue Jays
- TRI-27 George Springer, Toronto Blue Jays
- TRI-28 Adley Rutschman, Baltimore Orioles
- TRI-29 Gunnar Henderson, Baltimore Orioles
- TRI-30 Jackson Holliday, Baltimore Orioles
As you can see, there are only ten groupings and in a typical Topps move the Dodgers get two of the ten pairings. No Reds (no shocker) so I won't be chasing this set but I do think the concept is cool and I dig this year's design with the team name in the background spread out across the three cards in the Triumvirate.
The rest of the inserts in the box were much less interesting to me. Lots of shiny foilboard, if that's your thing:
The less said about those, probably the better. Honestly, the design of any of the four sets is perfectly fine on its own but when you look at the four different sets in the same scan they all kind of blend together into a non-descript shiny lump of cards.
Hits:
Each hobby box promises two on-card autographs and our box did, in fact, deliver exactly as promised:
Uhm, yeah. Two rookies that I know next to nothing about. That's about par for the course with Stadium Club hits. Sure, there exists the possibility of pulling something amazing but most of the time you'll get nothing but a couple of rookie autos and be forced to like it. I had to look up both of the guys we pulled, here's a quick glance at their stats:
José Fermín: 2024 batting average: .155 (71 AB)
Cade Marlowe: 2024 batting average: .250 (only 8 AB)
Now, you can see why I deemed the Sandy Koufax parallel #/25 the hit of the box!
Overall, I give the 2024 Stadium Club box the following rating:
Set Design: F *
Collation: F
Opening Thrill: F
Overall: F
*I originally had a C- for the Set Design grade but then I learned thanks to schwefumbler on my Discord channel that every pitcher's card has an incorrect win/loss record on the back of the card. Topps couldn't even get the statistics correct. Just an all-around shoddy job on a brand that used to be one of my favorites.
If this box is any indication of this year's Stadium Club, it's probably a set that is best left to pick up individual cards from the secondary market. Collation was horrendous in our box. Furthermore, the box was full of unnecessary insert bloat given the fact that the real appeal of Stadium Club should be the base photography. Speaking of that, while there are certainly several great photos, I even felt the overall quality of photography wasn't nearly up to Stadium Club's usual efforts. Add in the errors on the card backs for all of the pitchers in the set and you've got a list of gripes that might be the longest I've had for a modern card product (and that's counting stuff Panini has rolled out lately). In short, this was a disappointing box in every facet (and it's even worse when you consider the price that Stadium Club is selling for currently, about $190 per box)!!
Heck, I can even add one more gripe: This was a group break box, and the Rockies, Marlins, Padres, and Reds all went without a single card in the box. Just stupidly disappointing no matter how you look at it.
Comments
Post a Comment