Baseball Cards, Topps

2009 Topps Series 2, Review?

Topps Series 2 Baseball Review:

Here we go again, with some brand spankin’ new cards — Topps Series 2 Baseball. Going into this review, I’m expecting typical Topps photography which is almost always put to shame by Upper Deck and their love of Getty Images.  It’ll be fairly interesting to see who the rookies are, as we’re bound to see them in future Topps’ baseball sets.

Packs:

It’s unbelievably nice to not see A-Rod or Manny hucked all over these packages.  Now onto the hits…

Wow, there’s some serious beef-age going on with these.  First off, there’s something wrong when you’re pulling the same two mediocre second basemen in both Topps Finest and Topps Series 2.  I’ve got nothing against Robbie Cano and Aki Iwamura, but this is why people hate sticker autographs.  Obviously, there’s no difference between the autograph on the FINEST MOMENTS and the autograph on the Series 2 card other than a massive difference in price.  I guess this isn’t really a problem with Series 2 so much as it is a problem with Topps Finest…

I’m not a fan of the Manufactured Patches, so if anyone wants to trade for the M in Mr. October, shoot me an email.  The WBC game used is pretty neat, and I’m sure Topps agreed to sponser the Cuban Cepeda for a green-card if he agreed to donate his WBC uniforms…

Now onto my favourite parts of the set (my scanner decided to cut off chunks when scanning multiple images):

The Turkey Red Inserts actually look better, they’re quite well done.  The older players are actually the best of the bunch this side of the Pedroia Turkey Red.

Young, Campy, and Ty Cobb are all done pretty nicely in the Turkey Red Fashion. However, I think my favourite part is the Career Best Legends with Cy Young, Honus Wagner and Christy Mathewson — I’m not sure if these were included in Series 1, but I definitely didn’t pull any of them.  I’d like them better if they were all mono-chromatic, but I can live with a bit of colour.

The WBC redemptions are harmless enough, and they actually look pretty solid given the colour scheme they have to work with.  While I’m not a huge fan of the short-printed variations, I did manage to pull a Frank Robinson to go with my Christy Mathewson from Series 1.

The Topps Town codes look pretty solid, and I enjoy the blue over the silver from Series 1.  It’s also an incredibly awesome idea to use different pictures for the different parallels — good on yah, Topps!  There’s also the Red Hot Rookie redemptions, and I’m praying that I can nab someone solid…..like Matt Wieters maybe?!?!

Topps has it’s standard gold and black parallels numbered to /2009 and /58 and they’re both fairly boring, but some people love them.  What I’m digging in the photos on these inserts.  From Jim Palmer’s GIGANTIC, BEAUTIFUL head of hair that’s only rivaled by Travis Buck to Dusty Baker’s equally gigantic Chest-To-Waist Ratio.  Baker has the tiniest little girly waist combined with a Barry Bonds-esque upper-body.  Most of the inserts in Series 2 seem to be of newer events, particularly the Ring of Honor Inserts.

I recently picked up Joe Torre and Tom Verducci’s account of his The Yankee Years and I’ve yet to crack it, but I’ve posted his Ring of Honor card anyways.

Lots of solid rookies in this set, even if Matt Wieters and Tommy Hunter will end up being Red Hot Rookie Redemptions.  Seeing Brett Anderson and Trevor Cahill in the set is nice, although I wouldn’t be surprised to see the majority of these guys get sent down at least one more time.  Rick Porcello’s probably got the most hype of the bunch and the inclusion of Ricky Romero of the Jays was a nice bonus.  I’m not a huge Romero fan, even being a Jays’ season ticket holder, but the kid has put it together thus far.  Hopefully he’ll return from his oblique injury shortly.

Finally, we’ll deal with some of the ‘more interesting’ photographs on Topps Series 2 cards.  There’s some really nice shots, but there are also a lot of photos where it’s clear they tried to make a tiny little photo the size of a card.  This leaves the photo looking like crap, and filled with photographic artifacts everywhere…

The Estaban German photo is awful, but the Shaun Marcum photo more than makes up for it (what gunzzzz!)  The Luke Scott Card is ridiculous, and a little too sexual for my taste.

I’m loving almost all of the catcher photos in Series 2, and the Jeff Clement and Ramon Hernandez close ups are the best in the set.  Finally, the cheeky Soriano and unique Nelson Cruz photo are two lovely additions.

In the end, Topps still is out-down by Upper Deck in the photography department but they’re getting better.  Forgetting to remove the white background to Mike Aviles Rookie Cup is really annoying, but I’ll live.  A lot of the Topps photos are washed out, and someone seriously needs to show them how to re-adjust the contrast on their photos.  Topps generally takes every possible category in the baseball card flag-ship wars, except photography.

I’m somewhat upset that I didn’t manage to pull a Sketch Card, as they were far and away my favourite insert of Series 1.  I was lucky enough to interview two of my favourite Sketch Card artists from Series 1.  If not for a broken computer, the interviews would be front-page news here.  It’ll probably take a bit for me to retype the entire thing, but thankfully the original notes were saved in my email so expect them shortly.