1998 Bowman Series 1

Hey there, it's Matt. No, not matt., or Matt F., or even Matthew R. Long time, no post! You might remember me from previous A Pack To Be Named Later installments like 1996 Pacific Pure NFL Gridiron. No? Well, I don't blame you, I wouldn't remember that junk either.

What brings be out of hibernation you ask? Spring Training! I'm more excited about baseball right now than I have been for a long time. My Phillies had a disappointing season last year, and I'm eager to see if their veteran core can put together one more good run.

So I'm here today posting up a pack of 1998 Bowman Series 1, out of a sealed hobby box that I picked up online for $24 shipped. Why this set? Well, because of the emotional leader of that aforementioned veteran core. You see, this set features the Bowman Rookie Card of none other than Mr. James Calvin Rollins. Here's the first pack out of the box:

Ooo...shiny. Shiny and very, very boring. That's a lot of relatively small print jammed in there. The key details: 10 cards per pack, one International parallel per pack, and some other assorted inserts and parallels lurking around. Let's open her up.

Postmortem:

-Chipper is having a hard time there battling the sun.

- I actually really, really like the International parallels. If it isn't apparent what's going on here, the background map shows where the player hails from. Additionally, the text on the card back is in the player's native language. Mr. Monahan, here, is from Syosset, NY and expectedly, the back of the card is in English.

- The Montreal Expos. Remember when they were a thing???

-RAUUUUUUULLLLLL!!!!!

This was an okay pack. The Chipper lends it some star power. There is a Phillie in it, though I have no recollection of Dave Coggin whatsoever. Those late 90s-early 2000s Phillies teams were really, really bad. Raul closed out that pack, that's pretty darn cool. No J-Roll though, which was the ultimate goal.

 ...

Soooo...did I end up opening any Rollins rookies in the box?? Yeah, two actually. One in pack 8 and another in pack 15. The one in pack 8 was sitting right on top, staring back at me. I was pretty stoked. I also opened up an International parallel of Scott Rolen, which would have been pretty darn awesome back in 1998, with him coming off his RoY season and all. While Rolen's departure from Philly wasn't exactly amicable, I've come to respect his stirling contributions to some really, really bad Phillies clubs. 

I also beat the long 1 per case odds and opened up a Golden Anniversary parallel numbered to 50 of some guy named Pablo Ortega, who never made it to the Majors, but is apparently still kicking around in the Mexican League. 

Final note, as I just opened a box of this stuff to basically hunt down RCs of a single player, pretty much everything but the Phillies are up for grabs. If you're interested in any base, or want to know which parallels/inserts I opened, just let me know.

1998 Bowman Series 1

I grabbed three of these packs at the card shop. One for dayf, one for Ben and one for me.

This was back in the days when Bowman was guaranteeing that its set would be worth $125. It also apparently believed that pictures of baseball players on the front of the wrapper was a waste of time for the serious card investor. What they needed were WORDS.

Well words is what you got. There are 64 words on the front of that wrapper, plus a few numbers. And lots of promises that will never come true.

But let's put Mr. Cynical aside for a look at the 10 cards in my pack. I believe the key rookies in this set are Jimmy Rollins, Troy Glaus, Carlos Lee and a couple others:

180-Pablo Ortega: Ortega was a top pitching prospect for the Devil Rays, back when we knew a Devil Ray to be a weird-looking fish with wing-like fins. He advanced to Triple A before pitching in two World Baseball Classics for his native Mexico.

131-Bruce Chen: Chen reached the majors for the first time in 1998. He is now in his 12th major league season, performing fairly well for Kansas City. He has pitched for 10 different teams.

170-John Roskos: Roskos played in 37 games for the Marlins and Padres between 1998-2000.

85-Mike Lowell: Awesome. This is one of the semi-biggies in the set. Lowell is one of the most inspirational players in baseball as far as I'm concerned. There might not be anything left of him by the time he's done.

123-Adrian Beltre: The one-per-pack International card. Cards are shiny. There's a map of where the player is from in the background. The back is in Spanish. Unfortunately, I believe I have this card.

70-Chipper Jones: Wayne is Jones' middle name. As we all know, his first name is Larry. I hope Chipper will play again next year. I'm no Braves fan, but it's just not baseball without Chipper.

42-Albert Belle: Dude was intense. And scary as hell. Do you think he pretended the ball was certain people who "wronged' him? I think it's possible. Although he wasn't above taking "direct action" either.

136-Brian Sikorski: Sikorski played for the Rangers, Padres and Indians, but he mostly played in Japan. He last played for the Chiba Lotte Mariners. He's probably most famous in the majors for shutting down the Yankees in his major league debut for the Rangers in 2000.

57-Tom Glavine: Became the seventh Brave to have his number retired a couple weekends ago.

194-Lance Berkman: Mercy, look how trim he is. I would much rather see Berkman at first base for the Yankees than Teixeira. But Berkman is now on the DL, and Teixeira is puffing out his cheeks all over the place. And I just can't watch that team anymore.

Three Braves. I think I'm sending dayf the wrong pack.

Not a bad set. A pretty good design by Bowman's standards.