2008 Topps Heritage

It's heeeere... released the first day of Spring Training games too. Oh what a beautiful day.

238 Jim Thome
275 Anibal Sanchez
366 Baseball Thrills - A-Rod hits 500th home run
358 Hideki Okajima
394 Ryan Spilborghs
126 Dan Giese
488 Carlos Guillen All Star
264 black Shannon Stewart

The first card from the first pack - Jim Thome. Over/under for Steve's first White Sox card from a Heritage pack - the sixth card from the 47th pack. Place your wagers. The cards look great, but Topps still insists on computer fuzzing some of the pictures to give it a "Retro" feel. Hey Topps, you inserted an original 1959 card in my box. The picture quality was just as good as the unfuzzed cards in the set. The computer crap does not look good nor is it necessary. STOP DOING IT.

Yet on the "Baseball Thrills" cards where the originals were art drawings of the events, you use no fuzz. Guuuuh. This ends the nitpicky portion of our program.

The Rookie subset looks great though. However, I have never heard of Dan Geezy even once in in my entire life.

The All-Star cards look just like the originals too, down to the cartoon on the back. The ones I got have black backs, which is confusing since Topps put in a black back stealth insert. My one question is if this was the absolute best picture Topps could find of Carlos Guillen, why didn't they just make Derek Jeter the AL All-Star shortstop and be done with it?

Oh, and if you haven't heard about the stealth black back parallels, this is what they look like:

Basically the same as the regular cards, just with black ink instead of green. Ok, I need to rip the rest of this box. And while I'm ripping that box, I'm gonna chew me some gum.