2008 Upper Deck Timeline

I'm going to drop some weirdness on you guys tomorrow, so here's a nice, safe baseball pack . Well, not so safe, this pack has six short prints (on average). So how can there possibly be 6 short prints per pack? When there are 335 short prints in the set, that's how! This junk is a masochistic set builder's wet dream. So what I'm saying basically is I dig it. I did a primer on the set here, I'll go through each card in the pack as a refresher course. There will be a quiz.

35 Roy Halladay

This is the base card. There are usually two in every hobby pack and 3 to 5 in a retail pack. There are only 50 cards in the non-short printed base set compared to over three hundred short prints. I foresee lots of doubles in my future.

99 Jonathan Albaladejo RC

These are still base design cards but they are only one per pack instead of two. Normally the second card will be a veteran base card, but this pack is special. One thing I just noticed is that the back of the base cards do not have the player's name anywhere. That's not good when you've flipped the card over to type out the card number and need to check to see how to spell Albaladejo.

130 Tyler Clippard 1992 Upper Deck Minors

This isn't a variation card, it's part of the base set short printed to one per pack and given a retro design. The retro cards are the best thing about this set and it's nice that there are about 5 of them per hobby pack.

YSL5133 Don Mattingly Yankee Stadium Tedium

ARGH. The only thing worse than these annoying cards is when it take the place of a short print. It it wasn't Donnie I'd set the damn thing on fire.

61 Chin-Lung Hu Gold Parallel

Base cards have a parallel version with gold ink and foil instead of silver. I think they look better than the silver sersion to be honest. If I get loopy enough to actually try to build a base set (I'm not quite crazy enough to build a complete set yet) I'm pretty sure I'll go colorblind when it comes to gold and silver as far as my set goes.

171 J.R. Towles 1994 All Time Heroes

This is a nifty looking set but pulling the design in a new pack only makes me want to find a box of the original '94 cards. Any set with floating heads is a good set.

200 Micah Hoffpauer 1995 Premier Top Prospects

In the last post I wrote about this stuff, I mocked upper Deck for getting the foil and ink colors wrong. Now I'm thinking I screwed up and the design is supposed to be based on a minor league set unstead of '95 SP. Either way it's ugly and the die cut is unneccesary. This card has roller marks on it too.

279 Ian Kennedy RC 2004 Timeless Teams

This pack should have gone to a Yankee fan... If I could build any of these subsets it would be this one. At 100 cards at one per pack, it would be a bit tricky, but worth it. The design looks great and the back has a photo of the player's home stadium. I love it now, but in 2004 I despised the set and refused to buy any of it. Why? No Braves among the "Timeless Teams".

This is a pretty gimmicky set, but I love the retro (dear Lord is 1992 really retro?). I wish I could get a freaking Brave short print, all I've managed to get so far is a Brent Lillibridge base rookie. There are retail packs of this stuff too but the main difference between retail and hobby is there are a LOT more base cards in the retail set. If just you want to get cards 1-50 and complete the short set, then retail is fine, but this is one of those products where Hobby wax is really the way to go.

2008 Upper Deck Timeline

2008 Upper Deck Timeline [$3.50 each at a card show] - I was going through a prolonged pack withdrawal and had to randomly pick up a loose pack of something at a card show. I won't even bother with 2008 Stadium Club [maybe $25-$30 a pack I would assume] and while I'd like to bust a pack or two of 2008 Donruss Threads [to see what the cards look like], I've got three base sets coming through the mail [hopefully soon].

Pack one [8 cards per pack]
#26 Randy Johnson - the base cards seem a little 'junky' with the silver borders
#35 Roy Halladay
#79 Josh Banks

So apparently I get six short print cards on average - are these all the retro themed cards, because I only got five.

I don't know if it matters at all - but I may have mixed up the order of the cards pulled.

#147 Brandon Webb - 1994 Upper Deck All-Time Heroes; these cards are glossy, but the original cards were not.

#331 Jay Bruce - 1993 Upper Deck SP; if this card was released in some alternate non-first-year, non-refractor, non-autograph baseball card collecting world - it would probably be some kind of hot.

#125 Paul Janish -1992 Upper Deck Minor League; pulling this card makes me long for the clean design of the 1992 Upper Deck Minor League set. Maybe because it featured future Major League stars [Derek Jeter, Johnny Damon and Carlos Delgado just to name a few] in their formative years.

#205 Ross Ohlendorf - 1995 SP Top Prospects die-cut; it is annoying you can clearly see the damage on the left hand side of the card.

#213 Max Scherzer - 2004 Upper Deck Timeless Teams; this maybe the best looking design used in this product.

I like how the product plays tricks on your mind - even if you pull nothing of significance [its a midlevel product after all], it is a novelty to pull several different retro themed cards per pack. You kind of take a double take to pore over each card for a moment, seeing how well [or how poor] Upper Deck's efforts were in recycle the basic aspects of several of their products released in the past 17 years.

While the retro theme is interesting - I think the same core of rookies/veterans appear through different 'retro' themed cards, so it maybe best to 'consume' this product in little portions or wait until the price per hobby box goes down to about $15-$20 off the original release price.