2013 Hometown Heroes First Look

This set came out last month but today was the first time I saw any. I picked up 3 8-card packs at Target for $2.99 each. I like the cards enough that I'm considering buying a hobby box.

In the brief bio on the back of the cards, a mention is made of the player's claim to fame in his home town, thus the name Hometown Heroes. It's a 300-card set printed on a nice white card stock. Nothing fancy about them except for the bold graphics. The cards feature current and retired players and rookies. About half of the 22 base cards I got are retired players.  Some of them are players I've never seen on a post-career card, like Garry Templeton and Pat Tabler. 

We'll start with a World Series winner. The backs are pretty much all the same. Notice the prominent Player's Association logo. The small print disavows any association with Major League Baseball.

Only my second Puig card. Here's a few more...

As you can see from these examples, Panini is sticking to it's plan of just photoshopping out logos.

I always like to get post-career Bo cards. I didn't get the Mike Schmidt card but I've got one coming from eBay.

There are two complete parallel sets, "Hometown Heroes States" and Hometown Heroes Zip Codes"

Here's where some of the sense of this set starts to break down for me. You might think that this card would feature Dusty Baker's Riverside CA hometown's zip code. There'd you be wrong. 90012 is a Los Angeles zip code, so I'm guessing it's the zip code of Dodger Stadium.

There are a bunch of 10-20 card insert sets. I got 2 of them. With the Zip Code card, I got one insert per pack.

Not a particular novel idea, Nicknames is a 20-card set. You might expect that the card would explain how the player got his nickname but no. Each insert set comes in two parallels, black and gold. Some, like this set, also have autographed parallels, also with black and gold (which are serial numbered) parallels. The black autographed parallels are 1 of 1. No relic cards with the set. This card was a double hit for me. I collect Sandberg cards and he was just named the new manager of the Phillies.

This is the 18-card Home Grown Heroes set. I'm guessing that this is the black parallel. This sounds like a interesting idea, a set with players who grew up and played for their home town team. No, wait, Kaline was born in Baltimore. As with the Zip Code parallel and the Nicknames set, it looks like Panini had some good ideas but didn't know what to do with them.