Fielder’s Choice Baseball Card Blog

So we all know that Upper Deck X is a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad product.  It was quite possibly the very worst baseball card product of 2008, and Upper Deck will continue to satisfy what they apparently believe is a strong demand for ugly, uncreative, and worthless cards in 2009 by releasing a follow up to Upper Deck X.

But even though I disliked Upper Deck X since the first time I saw the product, I knew that I wanted to add the Evan Longoria cards from it to my collection.  It didn’t take me long to acquire his base card, die cut, and gold die cut, but his autograph from Upper Deck X proved to be extremely difficult to find.  The Evan Longoria autograph card is apparently a short print with a very small number of copies.  Since Upper Deck X was released in September, it has only shown up on eBay four times!  I know that because I searched for it every single day.  A while ago, I asked Mario from Wax Heaven to ask his contacts at Upper Deck about the card.  They told him that they couldn’t reveal the print run.  But since there have been so few of the cards to hit eBay, I’d be surprised if there are more than 10 – 20 of them in existence.

I really wonder why Upper Deck would produce so few copies of the card without serial numbering it.  Since it’s not serial numbered, only an Evan Longoria super collector like me would know that it’s so rare.  But I’ve been wanting to own it really, really bad.  When another copy of the card showed up on eBay last week, I immediately set my sights on it, and I was able to win the auction with my last minute snipe.  The card is definitely the best card in Upper Deck X and the most expensive, but it is absolutely awesome to finally own this card:

This is the 96th different Evan Longoria card in my collection, and the 23rd autograph.  I now have at least one Longoria autograph from every Topps and Upper Deck set that has included one, but I don’t have all of the variations, like the different types of refractors.  Unless Longoria has a horrible season or something, a lot of the low-numbered refractor autographs, especially from 2006 and 2007, are out of my price range.  But I am happy just having one from every set.  Anyway, with so few of these Upper Deck X autographs in existence, I know that I’m one of the only Evan Longoria collectors that owns one.  I wonder if anyone out there has more Longoria autographs or Longoria cards than I do – or if I am the ultimate Evan Longoria super collector!