When The Rain Comes They Run and Hide Their Heads
(…they might as well be collecting baseball cards)
I’ve been a terribly good boy lately, not spending hoards of cash on baseball cards that I’ll store away and never look at again. I’ve also been saving up for a couple of boxes of ‘09 A&G, and they’ve already been bought and paid for. They just have to get here. I’ve heard whispers that the seller I purchased those pre-sells from isn’t exactly reliable, so let’s all keep our fingers crossed. Anyway, to reward my good baseball card behavior, I thought I’d duck down to a hobby shop that was once known as Shinder’s, now called Beyond Shinder’s. Wouldn’t you know it? They had some 2009 Upper Deck O-Pee-Chee. On the day it was set to release, no less. And, guess what? I was the first person to purchase any. Boxes were being sold for $70 and packs for $2 each. I picked up four packs to sample and tide me over until the blasters let loose in, oh, say, November.
PACK 1
484 Hunter Pence
396 Marlon Byrd
413 Marcus Thames Black Border
1105 Derrek Lee 20th Anniversary Retrospective
564 Josh Outman RC
52 Gil Meche (Dinged Corner… boo)
PACK 2
495 Cameron Maybin
332 Kyle Kendrick
247 Johnny Cueto
585 Mike Hinckley RC Black Bordered
586 Donald Veal RC
77 Jorge Cantu
PACK 3
446 Joe Inglett
259 Joe Blanton
78 Julio Lugo Black Bordered
NY-5 Chien-Ming Wang New York, New York
520 Pittsburgh Pirates Team Checklist
PACK 4
473 Dioner Navarro
201 Brett Myers
554 Joe Mauer Moments Black Bordered (squeeeeee!!)
509 St. Louis Cardinals Team Checklist (featuring Albert Pujols’ severed head)
318 Hideki Matsui
464 Matt Joyce
There you have it. I’ll wait until I can get a larger sample (likely from a blaster) to do a proper review. I will tell you this off hand, though. All of the cards are on old school Topps Heritage style cardboard with just a slight amount of gloss on the front. The black bordered cards have yellow tinted backs with green ink instead of grey cardboard and blue ink. The Chien-Ming Wang "New York, New York" card was apparently the box hit, which is pretty sad, if you ask me. The card is super thick, so at first I thought it was a decoy. Nope! Those suckers are seeded one per hobby box. Also, the 1971 parallels were supposed to be seeded one per hobby pack, but, as you can see, I didn’t get a single one. Did they scrap that set? All of these cards are for trade, except for the Mauer, of course. I’m looking for all of the Twins cards from this set. I wish I could give you the card numbers for the Twins I need, but I can’t find a checklist anywhere.
Anyone else break ‘09 OPC today? What did you think?
