Group Break Cards from The Sandlot

One of the newer guys on the blogger block, Joe from The Sandlot, held a completely free group break a few moons ago. I was lucky enough for both of us to claim the Phillies (Joe is a Mets fan.) There was a bevy of unique and interesting boxes busted for the foil and cardboard treasure within. Here are some of my favorites that I received.

1996 EX-L Gregg Jefferies, Ricky Botalicco, and Darren Daulton: I really liked the 1995 E-motion set. The colored framed borders on this incarnation lent a certain degree of gravitas to the heavyweight emotions of "crashing", "fearless", and "pursuing". Though Darren Daulton has lately had dreams of being pursued of gigantic, doom-seeking numbers spelling "2012".

The set did drop the adjectives in later versions (EX-2000, EX-2001, etc), though the design was still a strong selling point.
1997 Metal Universe Mickey Morandini and Scott Rolen: Ultra-futuristic, comic style, avant-garde, cartoony marks distinguish this set from 1996-1998. They're not in this silvery tone though. Scanning metallic sheened objects is quite the ordeal if you want to showcase the vibrancy. Rolen looks like he's been grabbed by the Leviathan.
2002 Upper Deck Vintage: Nick Punto/Carlos Silva Rookies: This duo of rookies was traded for Eric Milton before the 2004 season. Punto went onto cult hero status in Minnesota and Silva became a decent pitcher in Minnesota before getting a big payday with the Mariners and losing his sinker. He was then traded to the Cubs for Milton Bradley before this season and has seemed to have found the drop again. Not a good trade. Though I do like the 1971 Topps homage of this set.
2003 Topps Chrome Gold Refractor Tomas Perez: You can blame him as one of the culprits for the spreading of the "pies in the face" meme. As a utility infielder (who played nearly every position except catcher)
2003 Topps Chrome Placido Polanco: This was the first go-round with Polanco, when he played 2B, and then was pushed out for the beginning of Chase Utley, though he could have easily been moved to 3B to push out Dave Bell. Instead, he was traded for Ugueth Urbina (who I think ended up in prison after that season) to continue Ed Wade's fetish of trading for relief pitchers during the season.
1998 SPx Curt Schilling: All the base cards were numbered in this set (I think this one was numbered out of 9000 or something like that) and there were five subsets all numbered differently. In addition, there were parallels (Spectrum and Radiance) that had lower numbering throughout all the subsets with numbers ranging from 1-4500. It was a layered mess; I wonder who tried collecting this set. The cards look nice though.

Thanks Joe. Let me know if you need any Mets cards.