A victim of advertising

I like to think I'm smart enough not to fall victim to the world of advertising.

But every so often a situation comes up and shows me that I'm just as prone as everyone else. Case in point: you may have heard that a snack brand called Utz is putting baseball cards in their products this year. Now, I don't know about you, but I'd never heard of Utz before all this. Though the Utz stuff at my Target didn't have cards inside, I decided to sample a bag of their Sour Cream & Onion chips a couple months ago.

And I liked them so much that I now buy Utz, and only Utz, whenever I get a craving for potato chips...congrats Utz, you win.

I was just at my local Target yesterday and they still didn't have any of the baseball-card bags of Utz: thankfully, though, I seem to have an Utz source here in the blogosphere with immortal reader and longtime friend of the blog Mark Hoyle.

He sent me a PWE right around the time I first heard of the whole Utz promotion with not one, but two Cubs Utzes with Contreras and Quintana here -- and I didn't have to spend a single cent!

In a tale of good timing, I received two more Cubs Utzes from Mark in the mail yesterday, just as I was starting to prepare this post.

I'm not sure how large the Utz checklist is, but I certainly wasn't expecting a relatively obscure dude like David Bote to be included (though I'm sure glad he is!).

Mark also sent me this enormous jewel that I'm way overdue in acknowledging -- a 1970 Topps Poster of none other than Ron Santo!

I'm not usually a fan of oversized pieces, but I think we can all agree and say this is unequivocally fantastic.

I often wonder how susceptible I am towards advertising (what little there is these days, at least) with baseball cards.

I always tell myself that I don't have to run to Target whenever there's a new set out, that whatever I need will be available for loose change soon enough. But more often than not, I end up scouring the card aisles at Target -- the reason I was there checking the Utz bags at all yesterday was to see if Big League came in (it did!).

Even sets I'm so-so about, like A&G, typically produce a Target run -- these 2018 A&Gs sent to me by my buddy Robert of "$30 A Week Habit" fame and were much needed since I didn't pull them from any of the overpriced packs of A&G I opened last year.

A&G's baseball-themed inserts are fun to receive even if they do typically feature the same handful of guys over and over again.

I don't know if my chase for A&G's non-baseball insert sets can be called "set building," in that I'm currently getting them at a rate of about one or two a year.

These two excellent "Indigenous Heroes" from Robert doubled the number of these I'd previously owned (only 21 more to go!).

In my head, I fancy myself collecting (and living life, I guess) in a very anti-advertisement way -- when the Baseball Card Mafia says: go high end, buy 874 mega boxes of Bowman, and get everything slabbed, I say: give me base cards, give me $3 rack packs of Opening Day, give me the off-center, the creased, the loved.

It's a rare treat to receive killer vintage in the mail, but that's exactly what we have here with this '59 All-Star Luis Aparicio I unexpectedly received from the perennially insane blog legend known as JBF a whole back. It's in better shape than about 98 percent of the other '50s Topps I own. I have so much battered vintage that receiving a good-conditioned one seems like an oddity. I'm proud of that. When the industry says Chase Mantle, I say Give Me Aparicio!

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a sudden craving for the bag of Utz sitting in my cabinet right now.