Tuesday, November 4, 2008

2008 Baseball Cards in Review - SP Authentic

My collecting strategy is to get at least a few of as many kinds of cards as possible. Blaster boxes are what I mostly buy, although I buy single packs and once in awhile I buy a hobby box on eBay. I don't really card about collecting sets (except for a few). I have a number of players, plus Phillies and Astros that I collect and I get a fair number of these players this way. I'd seen this SP Authentic set on several blogs and wasn't too impressed so I only bought one blaster.

In person, the cards are ok, but there is nothing special about them. In design they remind me of 2005 Flair so maybe Upper Deck had some old Fleer designers working on these. There are 191 cards in the set. The cards feature silver foil on the logo and text. The photo area of the card is high gloss with a non-glossy background. This is a favorite Fleer design element. The backs feature some text about the player, 6 years of stats and a head shot of the player. The back ground color roughly corresponds to the player's team colors. The best card I got is this Ichiro.
Below is an insert called SP Authentic Authentic Achievements. Although this card features Sabathia in an Indians uniform, the Achievement is a game on 5/14/08, where as a Brewer, he struck out 11 in a complete game shut out. There are 50 cards in this insert set and I only got the one.
This next card is an SP Authentic Marquee Matchups insert. There are also 50 of these and I have two of them. Lots of gold foil on the front. On the back it actually has something to say about Jeter-Schilling matchups over the years. Upper Deck featured an insert set with the same name in their 1996 SP set, but with only one player on the card.
The next and only other insert card I got is the SP Authentic Rookie Exclusives. These feature 60 different rookies. They thankfully do not feature the official MLB Rookie Card logo.
There is also a gold parallel set and 9 other inserts featuring either autographs (up to 4) or relics or combo auto/relics. The blaster box cost $20 and contained only 40 cards. I think they could have guaranteed an auto or relic in every box for that kind of money. The cards haven't shown up in Beckett yet but I'm willing to guess that the commons aren't going to be worth 50 cents.

4 comments:

night owl said...

Oh, I so don't like this set. I can't figure out why everyone is buying them.

capewood said...

I don't hate them but I don't love them either. Like I said, I just bought a box so I'd have some. If there had been some loose packs available I'd have probably just bought 2 or 3 and been done with it.

Dan said...

Sabathia was traded to the Brewers on 7/7/08, so his "achievement" was as an Indian.

deal said...

yeah don't look like my kind of cards either. I do like subsets like achievements though. will look for singles of those in a few years when they are good and cheap.