First baseball cards of 2015

It took a little longer for this year’s baseball cards to reach retailers near me, but I finally found them today and splurged to by a “value box” of 2015 Topps Series 1 from Target.

 

I really like this year’s design. The colorful borders help the 2015 cards to stand out from Topps’ recent efforts, and really, they don’t look much like anything else in the company’s 60+ years of flagship sets. The card fronts are mercifully foil free except for the Topps logo in most cases, and the backs have large, easy-to-read card numbers.

Or maybe I’m just happy that I found some Mets in my 10 packs of cards. Daniel Murphy was the top card on the first regular pack of 2015 baseball cards I opened. (He could have been my first card of the year, except I wanted to see what was in the bonus pack before I got started.)

And the Mets kept coming.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Seven Mets out of 101 cards… seven Mets out of 16 in Series 1. I’m still in shock… I’ve had years where I didn’t find my first Mets card until spring training games were already underway.

I found enough Mets cards that it didn’t even bug me that the Yankees outnumbered them 9-7 in the box. (And it helped that one of those nine was Masahiro Tanaka, the first Yankee that I (sort of) collect since Don Mattingly.

 

And I haven’t even gotten to the best part yet. There was exactly one insert (that I had a prayer of finding at retail) that I cared about in 2015 Topps: 2012 Olympic gymnast McKayla Maroney’s “First Pitch” card. Guess what I found in one of my 10 packs.

 

A bunch of my unneeded cards from these packs are already set to go to folks who will enjoy them more than I will, but nearly 10 percent of the cards in this box have found their way into my collection. More will get set aside for use with autograph requests and will find their way into my collection if they get signed.

Not a bad start to my baseball card collecting year at all.

What do you think of 2015 Topps Series 1? Do you have a favorite card yet?