What Are the Odds? Opening Day Edition

While I was out hunting for baseball card filled boxes of pizza, I happened to stop by the Walmart card aisle as well. There was a single, lonely jumbo pack of Opening Day hanging on one of the pegs. What could I do? I mean, I couldn't leave it there all alone, so I added it to the rest of the stuff in my cart. I actually kinda forgot about it in all of my excitement about opening the food-issue packs and posting about them. Since the dust had settled by the time I woke up this morning, I decided to go ahead and bust that lonely pack.

I didn't find any super interesting base cards that I didn't already write about so let's skip to a few of the inserts. I'm not a big fan of the Heavy Hitters insert, but I was still pretty happy to pull a Schwarber. I have a few others from this set and I kinda thought there was a printing defect on the bottom edge, directly below the second 't' in 'Hitters', but every card I've pulled from the set has he same mark in that same spot. I guess it's an intended part of the design. I do like the Striking Distance insert and was thrilled to pull this Ichiro. Apparently there is a second Ichiro in this set that I have to track down(focused on career SB). I was pretty bummed that I didn't pull another Superstar Celebration in this pack. Instead, I found my first Opening Day Stars. To say the least, I am not impressed. Historically, I love this insert because they have been done in much the same way as the Kellogg's issues of the past, but this year, these are supposed to be stickers? Other than the stock being a bit lighter than the rest of the cards, I wouldn't be able to identify these as stickers. Maybe if I tried to peel it, but I'm not going to attempt that. As I flipped through the pack, I thought that wrapped up the insert portion of the pack. Upon closer examination, I was wrong. Initially, there was another card that kinda stuck to the back of the Stars card...

I couldn't believe my eyes! In years past, I've hardly had the luck to pull more than a few of the regular mascot cards. In fact, after opening a blaster and a few other jumbo packs, I had only pulled the two mascots I highlighted in my blaster post. All of a sudden, I pulled an auto?!? From a pack of Opening Day? Wow, it's a heck of an auto too! I like that it is made to look like a law print. When the disbelief wore off a bit, I couldn't help but wonder what the odds on that pull were.

The odds are a whopping 1:287 jumbo packs! I was almost twice as likely to pull either a relic or a player auto instead if this awesome mascot signature. Its monetary value may never reflect the difficulty in pulling it, but for now, it's a welcome addition to my growing mascot collection. Thanks for reading, I think it's time for a snack...pizza anyone?