More 2011 Bowmania (plus Cool Story, Bro!)

On my way to some batting cages this afternoon (gotta enjoy the nice weather somehow!) I decided to stop at a nearby Meijer and give Bowman racks another shot.  I quickly scanned the card section and came up empty, or so I thought.  A guy, clearly older than me--so at least 30s--jumped in front of me out of nowhere and grabbed a huge handful of red rack packs that I eventually determined were Bowmans I had managed to overlook.  No big deal, I'm not that desperate, but this pathetic idiot then proceeded to feel up every single one of those packs.  I decided to look for some other stuff I needed then come back when he was done so I could grab whatever he left.

That's exactly what I did roughly 15 minutes later, only to find that captain jackass was STILL there, feeling up the SAME packs.  What was this guy even looking for?  I thought memorabilia cards were worth a pittance nowadays, and I don't know that it's all that easy to pack search autographs.  So it's bad enough that I or anyone else that wanted to buy some of those didn't get the chance because he was too busy getting fresh with them, but now even if he does leave the ones he doesn't think have anything in them, they'll have been molested by this guy and possibly bent to hell.

My solution:  a card molester registry.  Why not snap pics of all these losers in all their glory and slap them up on a Google map or something so they can be celebrated for their stupidity?  Anyway, that's my Cool Story, Bro...

On to happier news: undeterred by El Molesto above, I hit a different Meijer on the way home (I left the other one without buying anything) and got the stuff I needed--along with seven Bowman racks.  I won't do a full review since that was yesterday's news, literally, but I wanted to show off what I got:

Pretty nice start, right?  Guess what?  These all came in the same pack!  As a reminder, the Greens are #d to 450 and the Blues to 500 (was that really necessary, Topps?  Can we have one numbered to 475 and split the difference?)

A couple more Greens and a few more of the inserts I already pulled.  AJax is a keeper, natch, but everything else is up for grabs.

Four Purple Refractors (1:4, so I beat the odds there)

As for the updated standings for my pursuit of the base sets:

• Base set:  103/220 (47%)
• Prospects:  58/110 (53%)
• Chrome Prospects:  33/110 (30%)

Extras:

• Base:  24
• Prospects:  2 (!)
• Chrome:  20 (including 5 triples)

Since I'm so (justly) hard on Topps when it comes to collation, I give them this much credit after buying two blasters and seven racks (a total of 300 cards):

• I ended up with zero extras in terms of Base and Prospects when I opened the 16 blaster packs
• I had zero duplicates amongst the seven rack packs (obviously when combined with the blasters I had some)
• Overall, my collation has been above-average for Topps

I now feel justified in my guess that rack packs were the better value (20 cards for $5), and I'm going to keep on keepin' on with those until it's no longer worth it.  I'm gonna have to pull my base and Chrome Harpers first, though!