Finest Baseball was premium before premium baseball cards were everywhere. In 2007, Finest is actually a mid-range brand for Topps, but collectors still look forward to it thanks to autographs and several levels of refractors.
Boxes of 2007 Finest Baseball hold three mini-boxes, and many stores and websites sell it by the box or the mini-box. Each mini-box contains six packs with five cards per pack. On average, collectors should find one autographed card and four parallels in each mini-box.
Base Cards
Stars and young players on the rise are the subjects of Finest's 135 common cards. The cards are as shiny and glossy as ever (think Topps Chrome but on thicker stock), with a mostly white background offset by futuristic silver stripes and an octagonal border around the photo.
Card backs are a little short on stats, but do point out the finest 2006 moment for each player in keeping with the theme of the set. It might take a little work to collect all of the commons, as a full box gave me only 58 of the 135 veterans.
The well-known refractor parallels return in a variety of levels. Regular refractors are unnumbered, with blue refractors (numbered to 299), green refractors (#'d to 199), black refractors (#'d to 99) and gold refractors (#'d to 50) all in the mix.
X-Fractors are limited to 25 copies, and there are actually two different types of 1-of-1's in the form of white-framed X-Fractors and die-cut Super-Fractors.
I found a total of 10 base card refractors in my sample box: five regular, three blue, one green and one gold.
MLB Rookie Cards
A total of 30 players appear on cards with the MLB Rookie Card logo - or maybe more, as I'll explain in a moment. The first half are normal cards while the second half are autographed cards, and both types can also be found in the various refractor versions.
The box I reviewed produced six of the non-autographed rookies, plus one refractor and one green refractor numbered to 199. I also uncovered one autographed RC plus a signed blue refractor of card #166, Chris Stewart. Both the checklist that came in the box and its online counterpart at Topps.com stop at card 165, so it's possible that there are more autographed RC's than originally announced floating around.
Topps also included redemption cards for ten players who will become eligible for the MLB Rookie Card treatment once they play a big league game in 2007. The redemptions fall one in three mini-boxes and can be mailed in to Topps, who will produce and mail back a card of the player in late 2007. The About.com review box held a redemption for player #9, meaning it will be a bit of a wait to figure out who that player might be.
Insert Cards and Box Toppers
Finest has just one insert set, Rookies Finest Moments, that pays tribute to memorable events from the debut seasons of 50 different MLB players. Staying true to the rest of the product, all of the cards also have refractor parallels, plus a little more than half of them have autographed versions.
My review box yielded six regular inserts, three refractors, one blue refractor and one gold refractor. The final mini-box had a nice bonus as it contained a Ryan Howard Rookie Finest Moments Autograph.
Collectors who purchase an entire box of Finest will discover not one but two box topper packs. The first contains two more Alex Rodriguez Road to 500 cards, this time commemorating A-Rod's career homers 26 through 50.
Pack No. 2 is devoted to Ryan Howard HR History cards, with one card for each of the 58 big flies the NL MVP hit in 2006. Regular cards are numbered to 459, with refractors, X-Fractors and 1-of-1 gold refractors also possible. My bonus pack had one regular card and one X-Fractor numbered to 50.
The 2007 edition of Finest Baseball delivers what long-time collectors have come to expect without breaking any new ground. Good-looking base cards and refractors have become part of this brand's formula, and there are no problems there. The autograph lineup doesn't look like the strongest this time out, which can be a weakness when the three autos are one of the main selling points.
One nice thing about 2007 Finest Baseball is that it retained the mini-box format, so collectors who are on the fence about trying it can go that route to give it a try.