Tag Archives: Amed Rosario - Page 2

2016 Mets Top Prospects (Cardboard Edition)

Posted by on 23 January 2017 Comments Off on 2016 Mets Top Prospects (Cardboard Edition)

A very different kind of top prospect list

It’s that time of year again when a young (or not-so-young) man’s (or woman’s) fancy (or dread) turns to ordinal rankings of young baseball players. That’s right, top prospect lists! Everyone’s got one and you usually regret looking at the other guy’s. Why should we be any different here? Now, I am not a talent evaluator, so we’re going to have to come up with some other way to rank these guys. And after a comment I made on For All You Kids Out There (For All You Kids Out There is the official podcast of your Baseball Prospectus Mets Local site), the answer became clear – we’ll rank them by the strength of their cardboard.

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2016 Mets Card Spring Preview

Posted by on 12 March 2016 Comments Off on 2016 Mets Card Spring Preview

Unfinished business (scanning last year’s cards…)

Well, it’s that time of year again… Florida is relevant for baseball, prospect lists are coming out left and right, and I’m still digging through a backlog of 2015 cards to scan in the hopes of closing out 2015 before Opening Day (probably not happening…). But the card releases don’t stop, so I have to let you know what to expect in 2016. One thing’s for sure – there’s going to be a lot for Mets fans to chase in 2016.

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Product Spotlight: 2015 Bowman Chrome

Posted by on 8 December 2015 Comments Off on Product Spotlight: 2015 Bowman Chrome

The firsts keep coming

2015 Bowman brought consistency to the convoluted Topps parallel system. After several months of smooth sailing, 2015 Bowman Chrome kept the same formula (a first, at least among recent years) and brought us the first Kevin Plawecki base Rookie Cards and the first MLB-licensed autographs from Akeel Morris, Jhoan Urena, Milton Ramos, and Michael Conforto? Um, what’s his 2014 Bowman Draft autograph doing here?

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Product Spotlight: 2015 Bowman

Posted by on 3 September 2015 Comments Off on Product Spotlight: 2015 Bowman

In which I praise Topps for getting (some) things right

The evolution of the Bowman brand has been interesting lately.  Since the last major redesign in 2012, Bowman has added ice parallels, wave refractors, and mini shimmer refractors, removed the First Bowman Card designation, added a new 1st Bowman designation, introduced Bowman Black autographs, confused collectors with 2013 Kris Bryant Bowman Chrome autographs in 2014 products, added wrapper redemptions, ended wrapper redemptions, dropped the pretense of a “base set” in Bowman Draft, and much, much more.  After three years of incremental improvements, Topps reshuffled the deck in 2015 and brought order to an increasingly chaotic product.

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The Essentials: 2014 Mets Autographs

Posted by on 2 February 2015 1 comment

The Prospect Boom Goes Bust

With all of the cards released across dozens of products in 2014, it can be hard to figure out what is worth collecting and what might as well be forgotten. What makes something essential? It’s a mix of collectibility, notability, and attainability. Popular brands/inserts and player debuts will dominate here, not big money low-numbered parallels or big stars. Just about everything mentioned here should still be fairly easy to find on the secondary market at reasonable prices.

2014 continued the Mets prospect autograph explosion that started in late 2013, but that fizzled out late in the year. While that meant lots of autographs for many top Mets prospects who had previously been overlooked, it was bad news for the Mets’ 2014 draft class, which is still waiting for its first autograph card from Topps.

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28 July 2014 – Brooklyn Cyclones at Lowell Spinners

Posted by on 30 July 2014 Comments Off on 28 July 2014 – Brooklyn Cyclones at Lowell Spinners

We have all lost the will to win

Last year, the second Cyclones night game in Lowell was rained out.  This year looked like it could be a repeat with the tarp on the field and thunderstorms rolling through at the scheduled game time of 7:05pm.  First pitch was delayed by more than an hour, but this game would take place.  This sloppy mess of a game that went on for more than three hours with six errors and countless more misplays that might as well have been called errors.  Nobody particularly dominated but the Spinners lost control in the 6th to hand the Cyclones an 8-5 victory in front of a crowd of dozens.

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