Friday, August 31, 2007

I Get Letters: 2007 Bowman Chrome

Let me state for the 534th time, I don't "get" Bowman Chrome. (For all the "Chromies" out there, spare me your hate mail.) I've never opened a pack of the stuff, and I have no intention of ever doing so.

With that said, long time Stale Gum reader Dane Muramoto alerted me to a quality control issue with this year's BowChro. I reprint his warning as a public service to collectors everywhere.


I started opening 3 boxes of Bowman Chrome and noticed the following pattern emerge. The "chase" cards seem to appear most often in the 3rd from top pack position. Out of three boxes, one pack didn't have a chase, and that box, the card was in the 4th from top (2nd from bottom) position.

Also, the autographs were in all three cases in the bottom half (the side with 4 packs per stack) of the box. At first I thought the emergent pattern was lower left corner, but one of the boxes (the one with the non-blue auto) was lower right corner.

So this leads me to two theories on this release.

#1 If your box has a blue auto, it will be lower left corner.
#2 It is impossible to finish a set with 4 boxes.

I think #2 is a MAJOR pet peeve for me. With the boxes ranging $75-$120 (eBay to local), I cannot see paying $500 to complete a set.

This is getting ridiculously out of hand.

Anyway, just wanted to give you a heads up on it. Also a warning to readers to not buy single packs.

2 comments:

--David said...

Just for grins, I may try and put his experiment to the test. The only problem is that I would have to make sure I was the first person to grab packs out the box, or who knows where things might be in there.... Then again, I could just wait until "Indians Bowman Chrome" yields a team set on eBay and avoid the whole mess... :-)

MadMo said...

There is a pattern but it's not the same in every case. I've opened one case with the same pattern (which is different from the one you mentioned) but my second case had another pattern. BTW in both of my cases the autographs were on the top rows and there's always one stack with nothing.