2007 SP Rookie Edition

Ok, enough contest stuff, it's time for a pack. I was looking for a box of '94 Leaf for my box rip, but I found this pack instead. I was laser focused on Allen & Ginter when this came out last year so I never picked up a pack. Upper Deck goes Retro by using designs from their mid 90's SP sets for Rookie card parallels. When your company is not old enough to buy alcohol, you have to take Retro where you can get it. The Rookie part is seen on the wrapper featuring Delmon Young, Dice-K and Tulo. Half the pack is supposed to be rookies (on average!) so let's see if any good ones come out of this pack.

94 Michael Young
68 Joel Zumaya
69 Jeremy Bonderman
95 Mark Teixiera

The horizontally oriented base cards manage to be novel yet boring. The single color backgrounds and little SP logos everywhere do have a Retro 90's feel to them though. (this is not a good thing) I got the Tigers pitchers vs. Rangers batters pack. Tex gives the Rangers a big win over Guitar Hero. On to the rookies.

168 Gustavo Molina '95 SP
118 Sean Henn
265 Daisuke Matsuzaka '96 SP
127 Miguel Montero

Now we've got all catchers and pitchers. Molina is not even with the White Sox anymore and is in the Mets' farm system. Montero is a backup for the DBacks and is on the DL. Sean Henn is also on the DL and will likely be a reliever for the Yankees this year unless the rotation blows up. I think everyone is familiar with Dice-K. As far as the design goes, the base cards take the basic theme of the veteran cards, flip it vertical and add a second foil photo on the right side. They are a little busy for my tastes and the gold lettering on silver foil isn't the easiest to read. It goes without saying the entire subset is completely unscannable as you can see. The '95 Retro cards look bad. It has boring old silver foil instead of the holographic red and blue from the original set. Basically they took the best thing from that set's design and threw it out the window. The '96 cards look good though. Very close to the original, which was one of the better looking sets of the '90s in my opinion. I can't tell which of these (if any) are short prints. I think maybe the '93 and '94 cards might be the tough ones though if Beckett's pricing can be trusted. Dice-K pretty much saved this pack for me even with Tex.