Evan Longoria Collection grows to 84

January 24, 2009 at 12:48 am | Posted in My Cards, Topps, Upper Deck | 7 Comments

With three recent additions, my Evan Longoria collection is up to 84 different cards, with 21 autographs.  Here are the new ones:

2008 Topps Stadium Club (holding bat) #129/999

2008 Topps Stadium Club (signing) #983/999

These are the elusive Evan Longoria “base” cards from Stadium Club.  I’ve finally figured out exactly how Topps screwed with the Stadium Club base cards.  Out of the 150 cards in the set, two-thirds (100) of the cards are easily attainable.  The other 50, every card with a number that’s divisible by 3 (including Evan Longoria – #108), are short printed.  This is Topps’ special way of giving the middle finger to set builders.  But it gets even weirder.  There are two versions of each of the short prints, each with a different photo, and each one is numbered to 999.  But there is also a parallel of both versions of each short print, the “First Day Issue”, which is easily attainable (one per retail pack).  Somebody decided that it was a “good” idea to make the base cards harder to find than the parallels.

Anyway, set builders have two choices.  They can collect the “First Day Issue” parallels of all of the “divisible by 3” cards, or they can head to eBay and fork over more than they should have to for the base cards.  Then they have to decide if they want to collect only one of the variations of each card, or both.  Imagine that anyone is crazy enough to want to collect both variations of all of the base cards, and think about the fact that there can be no more than 999 complete sets of 2008 Stadium Club in the world.  It’s like Topps gathered their employees into a conference room and brainstormed about ways to piss off collectors.  “They want us to bring Stadium Club back, do they?  We’ll teach them … let’s make them regret it!”

I won’t even get into the ridiculous price of the hobby packs and the worthless autographs…

Anyway, speaking of products that disappointed collectors in 2008, I also got this Sweet Spot autograph:

2008 Upper Deck Sweet Spot Sweet Beginnings Auto #004/249

Now, I really like this particular card.  It’s a nice on-card autograph and the card’s surface has the same nice ball stitching texture of 2006 Ovation.  Oh, and Longoria is pictured fielding.  It’s not as cool as the 2007 Sweet Beginnings autographs with the mini-helmet embedded in the card, though.  Upper Deck also loaded the product with base cards and jacked up the price for 2008.  At least it looks like they might have fixed the fading problem with the on-ball autographs, although it might only seem that way because the product just came out and the autographs haven’t started to fade yet.

I really do like these cards; they’re great additions to my Evan Longoria collection.  But I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to add my commentary about the failings of Stadium Club and Sweet Spot in 2008.  Hopefully both will be fixed in 2009.  And yes, Sweet Spot is coming back in 2009 after all.  You can hear it from the Upper Deck horse’s mouth in last week’s Superfractor.com podcast.