2008 Topps Moments and Milestones

I went to the hobby shop today and found that the Heritage boxes are about 15 bucks more expensive than last week. Meh. Moments and Milestones was the only other new product out, Upper Deck seems to be lagging behind Topps in the release department. Last year I was tempted to buy a pack, but ultimately didn't. This year I wanted to see what the fuss was about and since there was no way in hell I was buying a box of the now overpriced Heritage I gave it a shot. The pack has A-Rod jumping around like a fool on the front with "Added Value in Every Pack" underneath. This is what I think about "Added Value". Enough with the moralizing, Let's rip a pack of overpriced gimmicky Mirror card crap. Okay, now enough with the moralizing.

142 Daisuke Matsuzaka - 125 strikeouts - #089/150
3 Frank Thomas - 384 Home Runs - #100/150
75 Vernon Wells - 6 Doubles - #142/150
137 Tom Glavine - 155 Wins - #023/150
13 black parallel Albert Pujols - 87 Hits - #05/25
140 Miguel Cabrera - 20 Doubles - #178/150

I'll say this, the cards are really nice looking. They have a Donruss Classics feel to them. Lots of white, black and silver on them, a sort of art deco design and the cards are really sturdy. Probably at least twice as thick as your average Topps base card. Good players in there too, Vernon Wells is probably the common of the bunch and he's a damn good player. Everything looks great, but I just can't get past the fact that the whole set is a bunch of gimmicky artificially scarce bunk. Without the fracturing of the base set so that each card can be numbered to 150, it's just another mid-level Hobby only product, like Co-Signers or SP. Now, normally if I would have pulled an Albert Pujols numbered to 25, I would have had a stroke. The thing is, I know that there are 195 other cards out there (one for each hit) all numbered to 25 for the black parallel. so instead of pulling one of only 25 Albert Pujols cards in the world, I pulled one of 4,875 Pujols cards with the black border and /25 on them. Not as spectacular anymore is it? Still a cool card, at least until Albert's elbow falls off, but once you figure out how the bewildering checklist works (and I'm still not entirely sure I have it right) it's just not quite the same feeling.

The pulls are good though. The Dice-K would have been nicer if this was a 2007 pack but still nice. Big Hurt is in a Sox uni , so a certain someone might be e-mailing me soon. Albert goes without saying. It's a shame we'll all be on "Albert Elbow Implosion Alert" all year long. Maybe he'll beat the odds and make it through the year. Cabrera and Wells are both nice players, but why did they pick Doubles for a stat? No one cares about doubles, Marcus Giles is a great doubles hitter and look where it got him. An invite to Rockies camp to push Jayson Nix. The Glavine card is sweet and would have been sweeter had I not just spent a buck on the exact same card when I bought the pack. Well, not the exact same card, it's for win 238 and is serial numbered 14/150, but everything else is the same. I almost wish (almost mind you) I had gotten the Mets version just so I'd have two noticeably different cards. I shouldn't gripe about pulling a Brave though.

So to sum up: Really nice looking cards. Great players out of this pack. Really tedious and confusing set. It's not bad stuff by any means, just know exactly what you're getting.