Collect call: 2009 SP Authentic Baseball

Posted Oct 20, 2009 by Bob D'Angelo

Updated Oct 20, 2009 at 08:10 PM

Upper Deck’s SP Authentic baseball set offers a simple, smart-looking design. The action shots pop off the front of the cards, and yet the backgrounds are subtle.

A hobby box contains 24 packs, with five cards per pack. A recent box I sampled yielded 95 of the 170 base cards in the set; so, it would seem that two boxes would get a set builder close to completion.

Here’s something I found interesting — and fun. Where possible, Upper Deck has tried to match the player’s card number to his corresponding uniform number. They were quite successful, particularly from cards 1-60. Here is a sampling: 2 (Derek Jeter), 3 (Evan Longoria), Albert Pujols (5), 24 (Ken Griffey Jr.).

There are 12 of the 20th Anniversary Retrospective cards, or one every other pack. In every six packs, expect to pull the short-printed Faces of the Game subset (on your checklist, cards 171 through 200). There are 25 Future Watch Flashbacks, seeded one to a box. The one I pulled was a Chipper Jones, numbered to 495.

Four parallel cards were included in the hobby box I saw, numbered to 19, 59, 99 and 299, respectively.

There are several inserts sprinkled in the box, too: for example, two die-cut Platinum Power cards, adorned with gold foil at the top of the card and also on the team’s logo. A second insert is the Pennant Run Heroes subset.

Upper Deck promises three autograph cards to a hobby box, and this box was no exception — with a pleasant surprise. A Dual Signature card is seeded one per case, and this hobby box had one — signed by Atlanta’s Kelly Johnson and James Parr, and numbered to 15.

The other two autograph cards were signatures on manufactured patches. The By The Letter cards featured autos of Boston’s Jon Lester (numbered to 30) and San Diego’s Everth Cabrera (numbered to 65).

Not a bad-looking set. Word of warning: open the packs carefully. I am not sure if it was me or whether the cards came out that way (although I am usually pretty careful when opening packs), but there were more than a dozen that were dinged in the upper left-hand corners. And, two that had major dings in the same spot.

So be careful.