Pack v. Pack: 2018 & 2019 Topps Stadium Club Stacks

Bill August 30, 2019 2 Comments

It’s been a minute since I’ve done one of these Pack v. Pack posts. I think the same thing happened the last time to me too. But this time I decided to use a bunch of stuff since I had the packs to do it. Welcome to the first ever “Stack v. Stack” version of Pack v. Pack.

I had two retail boxes of Stadium Club. One is from 2018 and one is from 2019. I pulled out the left side stack from each box (12 packs) and pitted them against each other. So just like the last one I did, these packs are related to each other given they are the same thing, just from different years

I figured with that many packs it would be a fair fight, but let’s see how it turns out.

Stack 1 – 2018 Topps Stadium Club

Since Stadium Club is filled with some older players, sometimes Hall of Famers and sometimes just “greats” of the game, these stacks are definitely going to give a different element than current packs I’ve used in the past. Given Hall of Famers give the most points, each stack had to get a few of them in right.

Wrong! Can you believe in 12 packs there was one base Hall of Famer? I got another later but I feel like I should have seen a few more. Given I opened the 2018’s first, it just felt like this stack was behind the eight ball.

One of the harder things to judge with Stadium Club is it’s kind of a “Stars & Rookies” kind of product. There aren’t a lot of middling players in these packs. When you think about it the set list is 300 cards so how many scrubs are you going to want to put in there. Included in there were Miguel Cabrera, Dwight Gooden, Adam Jones, Freddie Freeman, Charlie Blackmon, Nolan Arenado, Salvador Perez, Joe Mauer, Zack Greinke, and Dustin Pedroia who I considered “All-Stars.”

I’m only showing Greinke, Mauer and Pedroia because those are my favorite pictures of the bunch. I think may favorite is the quirkiness of that Pedroia card. Doesn’t it bring you back to the big glove from Upper Deck cards back in the day?

The “Stars” were a bit harder. Mostly they are harder because of my mental cutoff for a “Star” v. an “All-Star”. These guys have appearances in an All-Star Games in a lot of cases, but sometimes it’s just one. They could have been a Rookie of the Year, but there’s been plenty of guys who got that accolade and then really didn’t do much in their career.  This time I identified Khris Davis, Anthony Rendon, Dallas Keuchel, Justin Turner, Aaron Nola, Jake Arrieta, Corey Seager, Gary Sanchez, Jose Berrios, Josh Reddick, Hanley Ramirez, Elvis Andrus, Pat Neshek, Mike Moustakas, Lorenzo Cain, and Joc Pederson.

I liked the Keuchel, Davis and Rendon cards the best. My favorite of those heing “Tony Two-Bags.” He just made the All-Star Game for the first year (and didn’t play) which seems amazing to me. While I’m not a Nats fan I go to a lot of games since I’m in the Northern Virginia area so I get to watch him a lot. I know there are other guys like Arenado that kind of trump him in the voting, but this guy is amazing. Plus he tends to kill my team.

Speaking of my team… these were the Mets that I got in the pack. I got a little of everything that with an old guy (Doc), a current vet (Frazier), and a couple rookies (Rosario and Smith). I was really happy to get the rookies and especially the Dom Smith card. I love the picture in that card. I feel like from what I’ve seen of Dom, they really captured his personality and fun-loving nature in the dugout.

While I got a good bunch of rookies, not all of them were special to me.  They might be special to others, but for the most part I wasn’t super familiar with all of them.  Of course Rosario and Smith I’m very familiar with. After that, Brandon Woodruff was probably the best one of the lot.

I highlighted Fowler and Caratini for different reasons. It seems that whenever I see the Cubs play, Caratini somehow makes it into the lineup.  For Fowler, his name is so close to Dexter Fowler and I don’t confuse them, but I just thinks it’s funny how close their names are to each other.

I’m a fan of the Stadium Club inserts for the most part. My complaint for some of them (especially this year’s – maybe more on that later) is some of the blank space. It’s like it’s waiting for an autograph. But I always seem to like the look of them. The players I had inserts for were Francisco Lindor, Aaron Judge, Nolan Arenado, Justin Verlander, and Carlos Correa.

The special one of the bunch was the Black Special Forces insert for Correa. That one is number to 99 and got this stack some needed bonus points.

Just like being kind of short on Hall of Famers, this stack felt a little short on parallels. I guess I got a good amount of inserts though. The parallels above for Anthony Banda, Dennis Eckersley, and Matt Carpenter were the only that I got in the stack.

My favorite of these is Carpenter. I LOVE when the red parallels in this set go with the card. In this case the red in the parallel goes so great with the Cardinals uniform. I almost wish a parallel set could be in team colors but that would be pretty insane to do. It would look insane though.

Not a bad showing from stack #1. Let’s head to the 2019 stack.

Stack 2 – 2019 Topps Stadium Club

Let’s dig into that second stack of 2019 Topps Stadium Club and start comparing them. From the jump, there’s a bunch more Hall of Famers than the first stack. What I don’t know if the difference here are complete ends of the spectrum (one low and one high) or what. This stack included Jackie Robinson, Ozzie Smith, Wade Boggs, Babe Ruth, Jim Palmer, Sandy Koufax, Barry Larkin (again – he was in the first stack), and Bob Feller. That’s just the base!

These three are my favorites. The wizard flipping is crazy, but even crazier when you see this isn’t him in uniform. The other two I am always a fan of… guys signing autographs on cards. The Boggs I like the best as it’s an interesting angle and really gives you a feel of the old dugout in Fenway. It also gives you an idea of what you sometimes need to do to get a card signed.

Just to reiterate, it’s hard to not find All-Stars in Stadium Club and this stack didn’t disappoint there either. Cody Bellinger, Clayton Kershaw, Derek Jeter, Kris Bryant, Josh Donaldson, Jose Abreu, Christian Yelich, Ichiro, Charlie Blackmon, Xander Bogaerts, and Ryan Braun were all in this stack.

I picked these because of the backgrounds. If course Yankee Stadium and Wrigley are just classic. The angle on those, especially for the Bryant are cool. Then the angles on the two dodger card are great too. And how ’bout those Clydesdales?!

Honestly the Star cards weren’t super thrilling for me picture-wise. The Albies is by far my favorite of these. The Keuchel I just don’t get. I can’t remember if he was even signed when this came out so you know he wasn’t signed when they laid out the set. I mean it’s labeled as an Astros card. Why do we need to include that when there’s so many other players we could have cards of.

Also in the pack Bo Jackson, Aaron Nola, Juan Soto, Lorenzo Cain, Khris Davis, and Chris Archer. So many of those guys I could have considered All-Stars. Some maybe just haven’t had the time in to have the accolades.

I got two Mets in this pack. I was thinking this might be my first Alonso but no. I got one in Series 2 I think. This one is a lot more interesting to me though. I don’t know if this is a disappointing showing of Mets or not. Probably is to only me.

In addition to the Alonso, the rookies I got were Eloy Jimenez and two more. Nothing really crazy or worth noting other than the two of the main guys that folks have been watching this year.

My inserts were of Tom Glavine, Rhys Hoskins, Ronald Acuna, and Victor Robles. I really like the Robles because it’s a good card that goes with his Nats uniform. But I also like the old school TSC logo on there. That’s definitely the best insert (meaning most fun design) of the lot I got out of this stack.

I got eight parallels and these are some of my favorites. The Feller in black looks cool and the Rizzo in red is great in the same way the Matt Carpenter red parallel in the first stack was great. The Bauer almost isn’t as exciting now that he’s changed uniforms.

I’m not sure what this one is, but it had a different serial number on the back. I considered it a short print so we’ll see how that impacts the score.

The Final Tally

Drum roll please…

Stack One – 2018 Topps Stadium Club (84 pts)

• Parallels: 4 (4 pts)
• Inserts: 5 (5 pts)
• Inserts #’s 51-150: 1 (5 pts)
• Favorite Team:  4 (4 pts)
• Stars: 16 (16 pts)
• All-Stars: 15 (30 pts)
• Hall of Famers: 2 (10 pts)
• Rookies: 10 (10 pts)

Stack Two – 2019 Topps Stadium Club (119 pts):

• Parallels: 8 (8 pts)
• Inserts: 4 (4 pts)
• Super Short Prints: 1 (5 pts)
• Favorite Team: 2 (2 pts)
• Stars: 11 (11 pts)
• All-Stars: 15 (30 pts)
• Hall of Famers: 11 (55 pts)
• Rookies: 4 (4 pts)

Wow! So the second stack beat the first stack in almost every area or was pretty close. I think it was the load of Hall of Famers that really did it though. Yeah, that one that I consider a super short print added some but in the end it was just gravy.

I don’t know if we can say 2019 is better than 2018 Stadium Club. I would say it most definitely is based on the design. I would like to think that a stack of packs from the same type of box says a lot about what’s in there. But that’s probably not true. It was fun to look at a load of packs at the same time though.