2025 Panini Absolute Football Value Pack

Greetings!

Hope everyone is doing well.  In true Ol' Jafronius fashion, I started this post right around the Super Bowl, hence the football pack.  But as usual, life got in the way.  That, and an odd increase in Target hours have taken away my free time.  Anyway, life getting the way isn't new to any of you all; I shall try my best to be better posting, just don't expect it:

Feeling an urge to rip something (remember this was over a month ago), I decided to try one of these out.  Target had a bunch of it so why not; 7 bucks for 20 cards:

#88 - Brandon Aiyuk

#30 - DJ Moore

Bears fans will not forget his catch against Green Bay late last year.  Bummer he got traded to the Bills, but hopefully he'll have a successful run with Josh Allen.

#72 - Rome Odunze

#14 - Marvin Harrison Jr.

With DJ gone, Odunze will need to step up.  He did pretty well last year.  

#39 - Josh Jacobs

#81 - Jonathan Taylor

There's 200 cards in the set, the first 100 are veterans and the second 100 are rookies.

#23 - Brian Robinson Jr.

#66 - Bucky Irving

I checked older posts, and it's a pretty standard Absolute design.  Overall, the design is OK, it's what you expect from Panini.

Bucky is one of the 3 exclusive Blue Parallels.

#7 - Tank Bigsby

#113 - Chimere Dike (RC)

Here are the other 2.  Notice the extra shiny on the rookie card.  

Dike had an OK rookie year, with 4 TDs while playing all 17 games for the Titans.

#18 - Bijan Robinson (Hog Heaven)

#1 - Abdul Carter (Rookie Wave)

Insert time!  Each of those insert sets contain 20 cards, and yes they're shiny too.

#132 Jalen Milroe (RC)

#190 Trey Amos (RC)

A couple more rookies for you.  Trey played 10 games for Arizona, while Jalen essentially rode the bench (but I assume he'll get a ring).

#58 - DeVonta Smith

#99 - Joe Mixon

It's been a while since APTBNL posted an Absolute Football pack; the last one was back in 2020!

#41 - Tua Tagovailoa

#67 - Brian Thomas Jr.

Tua signed with Atlanta after being let go by Miami; the Dolphins owes him over $55 million!

#8 - Sam Darnold

#49 - Christian McCaffrey

We end the pack with the Super Bowl QB and the consistently great (when healthy) CMC.

Here are some backs because March Madness:

Anyway, that's the pack.  Not bad for $7; I don't buy a lot of them so as long as I get some good players I'm OK with it.

Enjoy those College Basketball tournaments, RIP Chuck Norris, and thanks for reading!

2025 Uno Elite Core Edition NFL Booster Pack

Target had these on blowout so I picked up a couple boxes for $2.69 each. I'll save the other box and packs for later on my new blog Batting Out Of Order.

Each box has four booster packs with ten cards in a pack.

The ten cards include two cards from each Uno color: Red, Green, Yellow, Blue, and two foil cards.

The player will have four cards with the same photo but in the four different colors.

There are 192 cards in each color set.

I pulled green foil and yellow foil parallels.

All told, there are nine different foil parallels, each with 192 cards.

I'll let you do the math.

2025 Topps Update Series Rack Pack

Greetings!

Hope everyone is doing well and got to enjoy the holiday season.  The time between Halloween and New Years seems to go by like that.  I don't know about you all, but I get a little bummed out when all the Christmas decorations start coming down.

The Update series was released in mid-November, and I think it took till after Thanksgiving for packs to start showing up on retail shelves.  The eldest got a pack for each of us, the usual 7 bucks for 36 cards.  Here's what he got:

#US240 - Randy Rodríguez

#US247 - Tyler Owens (RC)

#US1 - Kristian Campbell (RC)

#US172 - Daylen Lile (RC)

Not surprisingly, 3 of the first 4 cards are rookies.

Lile's wearing Washington's 2025 City Connect uniform, which feature D.C.'s street grid on the jersey as well as a 3D interlocking D.C. logo on the jersey’s chest, referring to the 1956 Washington Senators logo.

#US113 - Drake Baldwin ((RC - Rookie Debut)

#US105 - Marcelo Mayer (RC)

#US199 - Roki Sasaki ((RC - Rookie Debut)

#US314 - Matthew Lugo (RC)

4 more rookies.  Everyone's not a fan of the Rookie Debut cards.  Make them an insert set put more players in the release.

#US300 - Rafael Devers

#US320 - Austin Kitchen (RC)

#US195 - Isaac Paredes

#US139 - Jon Berti

I'd rather have more journeymen like Berti in the set than those Rookie Debuts; there's 40 of them in the set!

#US161 - Armando Alvarez (RC)

#US50 - Cody Bellinger

#US68 - Matt Mervis

#US291 - Mickey Gasper (RC)

"Mash" Mervis has yet to do so, hitting only 10 homers (and a .165 BA) with the Cubs and Marlins.  He signed with Washington for the 2026 season.

#US82 - Max Kepler

#US29 - Luis Matos

#US130 - Ben Williamson (RC)

#US256 - Dalton Rushing ((RC - Rookie Debut)

Matos is wearing the Giants' 2025 City Connect uniform, based on graphics inspired by the 1960's  "Flower Child" era.  OK then.

#US242 - Charlie Morton

#US86 - Aaron Judge Season Highlights (Checklist)

I enjoy a good season highlight, but this seems more like an excuse to get another Judge card in the set.  The highlight seems a little too team-specific.

#US350 - Paxton Schultz (RC)

#US116 - Aroldis Chapman

The Update set ends (and also started) with a Rookie.  There are 153 Rookies in the set.  That seems to be a lot.

#US121 - Ryan Johnson (RC)

#U90-18 - Tomoyuki Sugano (RC)

I think both of these are Rainbow Foils.  The 1990's from Series 1 and 2 were not all foiled up, so the decision to make the Update Series all foily was a curious one indeed.

#SMLB-73 - Andrew McCutchen (Stars of MLB)

#SMLB-77 - Shohei Ohtani (Stars of MLB)

There are 25 cards in the Stars of MLB insert set, and you get 2 of them in each rack pack.

#US56 - Dominic Canzone

#US146 - Kade Strowd (RC)

#US264 - Kumar Rocker (RC - Rookie Debut)

#US38 - Dalton Rushing (RC)

It's a Dalton Rushing hot pack!

#US269 Shohei Ohtani / Roki Sasaki (Veteran Combos)

#US14 - Denzel Clarke (RC)

The Veteran Combo cards (there's 15 of them total) can also follow the Rookie Debuts out the door.  In MLB terms, Roki isn't a veteran, right?  He doesn't get the RC logo because Ohtani?

#US345 - Matt Shaw (RC - Rookie Debut)

#US282 - Coby Mayo (RC - Rookie Debut)

And we end with 2 more Rookie Debuts. Since the Cubs signed Alex Bregman over the offseason, it appears Matt will take on a Utility role with the team.

Here are some backs because Ohtani:

Anyway, that's the pack.  Not much to say other than enjoy the Super Bowl, and thanks for reading!

1996-97 Upper Deck Black Diamond Hockey

 

1996-97 was the first year of Upper Deck's Black Diamond product for hockey. It was a time when short prints, inserts, and parallels were fairly new to the hobby, and I do remember quite a lot of collectors being excited about the chance to pull some very rare cardboard from their packs. 

A specific rundown for the 180-card set is interesting, and goes like this:

 

Cards 1–90 are single blank diamonds

Cards 91–150 are double black diamonds (1:4 packs)

Cards 151–180 are triple black diamonds (1:30 packs)

 

Then there's the parallel "gold" set:

Single black diamond gold (1:15 packs)

Double black diamond gold (1:46 packs)

Triple black diamond gold (only 50 of each card available) 

 

The biggest rookie card in this set features Joe Thornton. He's card #160, which means it's a triple black diamond. So it's highly unlikely that I'll find one in this pack. And with only 6 cards per pack, it's also unlikely I'll find any insert at all. But someone's got to find one, right? Let's find out! 

 

Note: The "Light FX" treatment on these cards shows up better in photographs than it does in scans, so you'll be seeing photographs below. 

 

 

Keith Jones leads it off. He was a tough player who could also score, especially around the time this card was released. (Career-high 25 goals in 1996-97.) After his playing days ended, Jones was a solid TV analyst for almost 20 years. Currently he's President of Hockey Operations for the Philadelphia Flyers. 

 

 

 

A young Bill Ranford did so well in leading the Oilers to a Stanley Cup victory in 1989-90 that he was awarded the Conn Smythe trophy at the end of it (playoff MVP). Ranford racked up a lot of wins for the team through the 1995-96 season. After that, he bounced around from Boston to Washington to Tampa Bay to Detroit (and then finally back to Edmonton). All in all, he tallied 240 wins across 15 NHL seasons. 

 

 

 

Rem Murray had a couple of 20-goal seasons across his 9-year NHL career, and just missed 100 career goals by a few (94). He played mostly for Edmonton, but also had a couple of years in the Big Apple with the Rangers, and another couple with the Nashville Predators. 

 

 

 

Mike Richter will be forever popular among Rangers fans for helping the team to its memorable Stanley Cup victory in 1994. He squeaked past the 300-win mark for his career (301), which was spent entirely with the Rangers. His hockey mask featuring the Statue of Liberty was pretty iconic, too. 

 

 

 

Denis Savard was a speedy, shifty skater who was famous for the "spin-o-rama" move. The Hall-of-Famer and 1992-93 Stanley Cup winner (with Montreal) was at the very end of his career by the time this card was printed, but it's still a nice one. 

 

 

 

And lastly, we've got Sergei Zubov. The talented defenseman was one of the first Russian players to have his name inscribed on the Stanley Cup (1993-94 New York Rangers; the other three were Sergei Nemchinov, Alexei Kovalev, and Alexander Karpovtsev). About 5 years later, Zubov helped the Dallas Stars to their first Cup victory. He put up great offensive numbers throughout his career, and logged more than 1,000 total games. He's a member of the NHL Hall of Fame. 

 

 

 

Now here's an example of a card back. Typical for Upper Deck at the time, it lists only the most recent few years of stats, and uses some of the extra room for a nice color photo. Solid write-up, too. On the negative side, the card number is tiny. (It's in the top-left corner, if you zoom in and look really hard.) This was also typical for Upper Deck at the time, and it's still hard to understand why they'd do such a thing.

In any case, that's that. For the first time on APTBNL, a pack of 1996-97 Upper Deck Black Diamond hockey cards. No superstars or multi-diamond short prints. No gold parallels. But it was still fun to rip this pack. Thanks for reading along.

Anyone else remember the excitement that surrounded the Black Diamond brand when it first hit the shelves back then?

1988 Topps

Greetings!

Hope everyone is doing well and had some fun over the Thanksgiving weekend.

While my eldest son is awaiting the results of his 12 (!) college applications, my youngest son has only recently begun thinking of his post-high school life.  I'm not worried; he for sure isn't applying to 12 colleges!

The Wifey took him to New York City back in October to see a school there; when they came back, they had baseball cards for me and the eldest.  They visited a candy store and there were packs there, so they picked up several packs for the 2 of us to split.  

Yeah it was 2 bucks.  It's the thought that counts!

I double-checked the APTBNL roster and was very surprised that a wax pack of 1988 Topps has yet to be opened.  I'll wait while you check!

Here's the wax pack all opened up:

Say no to drugs and be a true superstar, kids!

15 cards and a 37 year old piece of gum per pack.  Here's what my son got:

#729 - Blue Jays Leaders

#713 - Willie Hernandez

#197 - Lance McCullers

I remember being stunned to see the player breakthrough the border on this set.  It was only my second year collecting but I guess I just assumed the shot of the player would stay within the borders.  

#155 - Bruce Sutter

#391 - Kirby Puckett (All Star)

#205 - Nelson Liriano

#52 - Don Robinson

Those All Star subset cards were fun.

Hey, it's an ad for Topps Collector's Edition cards!  Anyone out there get one of these sets?

#240 - Lee Smith

#34 - Ricky Horton

#561 - Rick Cerone

#691 - Dan Pasqua

Lee Smith and Bruce Sutter in the same pack, not bad!

#198 - Franklin Stubbs

#652 - Bruce Benedict

#256 - Ken Schrom

#350 - Will Clark

Ken Schrom's sunset card!

Here are the backs because gum stains:

Since the gum would be in the front of the pack and not the back, I assume Will The Thrill was on the front, and the kid moved him and all the other cards with the backs facing the front to the back of the pack.  No biggie.

Here's my pack, with the cards for sure in right order:

#263 - Glenn Braggs

#397 - Jack Clark (All Star)

#431 - Casey Candaele

#191 - John Cerutti

Candaele with the Topps All Star Rookie Cup for Second Base.  

#564 - Frank Lucchesi (MGR)

#170 - Rich Gossage

#325 - Glenn Hubbard

#103 - Curt Young

Lucchesi managed the last 25 games of the season for the Cubs, replacing Gene Michael.  The team went 8-17, and the Cubs brought in Don Zimmer for the 1988 season.  

#371 - Joe Hesketh

#387 - Willie Randolph (All Star)

#276 - Luis Salazar

There's 792 cards in the set.  Here's the checklist if you need it.

#351 - Cardinals Leaders
#697 - Steve Lombardozzi

#404 - Benito Santiago (All Star)

#424 - Dwayne Murphy

Red Schoendienst making the appearance on the Cardinals Leaders card.  Since they didn't mention this anywhere on the card, young me looked at the card and went "who's this guy?"

Here's the backs because moar gum stains:

Braggs didn't get it as bad as The Thrill.

Anyway, those are the packs.  Not bad at the time, right?

We'll see if I get another post up before the end of the year, but in case I don't, I hope everyone has a great holiday season.  Be safe and happy, and I hope you all get what you wish for this year!

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year...and thanks for reading!