Happy National Baseball Card Day!

Today is National Baseball Card day, in case you missed the banner headlines and all the television promotions.

Cardboard Junkie mentioned this yesterday. If you go to your local card shop you can get a free 10-card pack of special cards put out by Topps and Upper Deck. Junkie also mentioned that Toys R Us had Upper Deck Super Star Packs. Since I don't have a local card shop, I decided to go over to Toys R Us and see what I could find.

They had the Upper Deck cards, which turned out to be a box with 75 Upper Deck Series One cards and three "Super Star" cards. These look like the regular Upper Deck cards but with gold foil instead of silver, and a gold foil Super Star marking on the front. There are 10 cards in the set. I'm not sure but they appear to be numbered the same as the equivalent card in the Series One set. This will cause much confusion in the future. The best card I got was Ichiro.

They also had some of the 2008 McFarlane Cooperstown Collection of baseball player figures. I bought the Mike Schmidt and the Chase Utley. I haven't opened the Schmidt yet but it appears to be the exact same figure as the 2005 Schmidt I have except for a uniform change. The 2008 is in the home uni while the 2005 figure is in the away uni.

When I got to the checkout counter the girl at the register asked if I wanted to enter a contest. She handed me the Opening Day 2008 Home Run Scratch-N-Win Game card. Fabulous prizes but I didn't win anything. She also asked me if I wanted a free pack of baseball cards. I said "Sure, that's why I came here today. It's National Baseball Card Day". She said "Really"? I said, "That's why you're giving away free baseball cards". "Oh", she said, "I don't follow sports".


There were 5 Topps and 5 Upper Deck cards in the pack. The Topps cards look just like the regular Topps cards with the addition of the National Baseball Card Day logo. I was happy to get Ryan Howard.

The Upper Cards have a different design then the regular cards but looks exactly like the 2006 Upper Deck National Baseball Card Day cards. That's the only other one of these I have. Perhaps they use the same design every year.

So I had a happy National Baseball Card Day. I hope you did too.