2022 Bowman Blaster

There is an old saying that you should not go to the grocery store when you are hungry.  If you put that in baseball card terms, you should not go to Walmart/Target right after a new product is released.  For a collector like myself who watches my hobby budget pretty closely, it does not pay to buy overpriced blasters very often but it is hard to resist the temptation.

After spending most of last Saturday working outside on various projects, my wife, son, and I headed to Walmart to do the weekly shopping.  My son knows exactly where the card isle is and always steers the cart to that checkout lane.  I was a little in shock to see over 20 blasters of 2022 Bowman baseball sitting on the shelf.  I believe it was just released a few days before.  The card inventory at my Walmart has been back to pre covid levels the last few months, but I was still surprised to see so much new product.  Because he helped me most of the afternoon, I gave in and let my son pick out a box that was about $35 after taxes.  That is steep for 7 packs of 12 cards, but that is the world we live in now.  I will let you judge the value of my purchase.

The checklist has 100 veterans and 150 prospects.  Each pack had about 6 veterans, 3 paper prospects, 1 insert and 2 chrome prospects.  I was a little disappointed not getting a single Cardinal in the entire box.  My son did manage to pull the Altuve base card.

My 16 chrome cards had 8 1st year cards and 8 other cards.  I do not remember if each pack had 1 of each.  I did not recognize any big names right away.  After looking at the draft status and prospect rankings on the back, it did not appear like I pulled anything great.

We hit the insert ratio almost dead on.  The 3 different cards on the top were 1:6 packs, the bottom 2 1:3 packs.

My son and I opened 3 packs each.  My wife wanted to open a pack also.  Her pack contained the next 2 cards.

She pulled this Abrams first.  Not a bad card with odds being 1:595 retail packs.

Autograph odd are actually better at 1:129 packs.  I have never heard of Fassnacht.  He was picked in the 8th round of the 2019 draft.  His player page on milb.com says he retired in February 2022.  Maybe there is a Phillie collector out there who can use this.