One of the things I like about repacks is the possibility of finding something I never saw before. Take this card, for example, that I recently pulled from a Fairfield 250-card cube.
You may say, "What, you never saw a 2008 Topps card before?" Of course that is what I thought it was. When I went to add it to my database, I saw I had listed Christian Guzman as card #17 in the set. I figured I made a mistake about the number on the Guzman card. Since I happened to have the Guzman card scanned for some reason, it was easy enough to look up the card. Here it is:
Hmm, the Guzman card
is #17. What's going on here? After poking around on Becket.com for awhile, I discovered something called 2008 Topps Gift Sets. In 2008, Topps published "Gift Sets" for 6 teams, Cubs, Dodgers, Mets, Red Sox, Tigers and Yankees. Each set had 55 cards. The sets had, in addition to regular player cards, a lot of special cards. For example, the Dodger set #9 is "Jeff Kent 16th to have 500 Doubles/and 350 HRs".
Topps apparently offered something similar in 2007. As far as I know, I've never seen one. I say "as far as I know" because there is nothing obvious in the Ryan Theriot card above the suggests it's not from the regular set. By the way, here's the Theriot card from the regular set.
So the card features a different photo on the front, but the exact same back, except for the number. All that fine print in the grey rectangle at the bottom is exactly the same on both cards.
By the way, why isn't Theriot's nickname "Ryan the Riot"?
1 comment:
I have the 2007 Mets gift set... If I remember right, it sold for $20. For 2008, they decided to add a random autograph to each gift set, the price went up to something like $40 or $50, and I said "Sorry, I'm out".
I don't remember any of the 2007 Mets cards having different photos, but I'm too lazy to get up and check. I do know that they had cards for the coaches, Mr. Met, season highlights and players who didn't make it into the regular set.
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