Wednesday, October 03, 2007

2006 Upper Deck First Pitch Baseball


This next offering from my repack box is one of the slimmest I'll be opening. 2006 Upper Deck First Pitch offers five cards per pack, one of which is guaranteed to be an insert. I assume this product is comprable to Topps Opening Day, aimed at more of a kid market. Does the strategy of small-count packs work? Upper Deck seems to think so. After all, if there's one thing kids want, it's less of what they like. From personal experience, time after time I have seen kids complain that they got too much ice cream, too many Christmas presents, and they were allowed to play in a pit filled with plastic balls for far too long. This is why I generally don't collect Upper Deck.

Let's tear in:

Top to Bottom:

29 Trot Nixon
133 Mike Mussina

HS-15 Nomar Garciaparra Hot Stove Headlines (What a ridiculous card. If anything, they should have made a fake old-timey headline card referring to the fact that Nomar gets to have sex with Mia Hamm on a regular basis. That's something worthy of an "EXTRA! EXTRA!" boast.)
142 Rich Harden
77 Juan Pierre

Grade: D for Dull. There's virtually nothing here that would make me buy another pack. This set is not even bad, it's just...pointless. I am reminded of Rod and Todd Flanders from "The Simpsons" playing one of their Christian-themed board games with Bart. When Bart asks, "Why aren't there any dice?" one of the brothers responds, "We move one square at a time...that way it's less fun." Upper Deck First Pitch is just like Topps Opening Day, just less fun. I'll take a Stomper card any old day of the week over any card from this set.

2 comments:

Jason Wilder said...

That set does look boring. Nothing about it yells "make a set out of me!"

dayf said...

This set sucked. UD did a much better job with First Edition this year, but then Topps trumped them with mascot cards and the numbered parallel in hobby packs.