Remember way back here when I thought I had ripped the 2004 version of a crappy product, but I ripped the 2005 version instead? Well I found a pack of the 2004 version and bought it so I could rip it here. That's right, I paid money for a pack of cards I hate just so I could complain about it on the internet. That's just the kind of guy I am. An idiot. Let's open this sucker as long as I got it.
16 Mike Piazza
49 Kerry Wood
26 of 30 HM Jose Reyes History in the Making
13 Alex Rodriguez
20 Richard Hidalgo
Yeah, an insert! I'm old-school enough so I'm still impressed by such things. It's a little busy, but I dig the baseball morphing into a stadium thing going on. I'm a fan of Jose Reyes even though he's a Met. I like Reyes because he's kicked ass for me on fantasy teams before and because he seems to piss off a certain percentage of the Met nation for some reason. You have one little slump during a collapse of epic proportions and fans get tetchy I guess. This is the easiest insert to pull at 1:4. There's also an American Made insert at 1:12 packs and National Treasures numbered to 500 at 1:240 packs. Game used fall at 1:24 while numbered rookies are 1:48 packs. Once again jersey cards are easier to pull than one third of the set. That's right, the base set is 60 cards with 30 numbered rookies. So, if my math is correct, if you rip 48 packs and get your one rookie card, you'll also have 3 and 2/3rds base sets, 12 History in the Making, 4 American Made and two gamer cards. Now you only have 29 more rookies to go!
Ok, enough about the crappy checklisting, now onto the crappy base cards. The design is full of the normal excesses, spot UV coating, silver ink, too much stuff going on in the background. I'm a sucker for black borders though and the baseball diamond and freakishly large home plate doesn't look too bad. This wouldn't be that terrible a set had Fleer just not decided to have the players embossed on all the cards. The only two sets where embossing worked at all are Action Packed and maybe Ovation and both of those sets are dead and gone. Here it's just excessive and makes the cards that much clunkier. I got an A-Rod though and one of probably a thousand Piazza cards in my collection. If I had a nickel for every Piazza card I've pulled, I'd probably make out better than if I tried to sell 'em all on eBay. So there's the short, sad run of National Pastime. One of the most useless card sets on the planet. And I just bought a pack of both of 'em in the past couple of months. I am an eeeediot.
YES - somebody FINALLY pulled a card of my all-time favorite baseball player, Richard Hidalgo. He's rivaled in greatness by only Babe Ruth; rivaled in career collapse by only Sammy Sosa.
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