Sticking with the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" philosophy, 2008 Finest Baseball adds hard-signed autographs and a few new inserts but otherwise doesn't tamper much with what worked for it in the past. That means autographs, shiny stock and the popular rookie redemption program all return.
Finest is sold in six-pack mini boxes with five cards in each pack. Every mini box should contain one autographed card on average, and each master box should contain one rookie redemption card and 12 Refractor parallels.
Base Cards and Refractors
If it's Finest, it must mean base cards on thick Chrome stock with some kind of geometric frame for the player photos. The 2008 cards have a hexagon-shaped frame with player info in an oval at the bottom. A bunch of players who switched teams during the off-season are already pictured in their new uniforms, like Dontrelle Willis is in the card above.
The base set starts out with 125 veterans and 25 first-year players with the official MLB Rookie Card logo. Rounding things out are 16 unnumbered autographed rookies, who appear with on-card signatures for 2008. That's always good to see, but the area for the autograph is made of reflective silver, making some of them a little hard to read.
Refractors are in full effect as always, falling four per mini box on average. This year's assortment includes regular unnumbered Refractors, as well as Blue (numbered to 299), Green (#'d to 199), Black (#'d to 99), Gold (#'d to 50), Red (#'d to 25) and 1-of-1 White X-Fractors. Autographed rookies appear in the same levels, though the base Refractors have print runs of 499.
The Finest base set is tough to put together by opening mini boxes, as three of them opened for this review yielded just 50 of the 125 veterans and eight of the 25 regular rookies. I also pulled an autographed rookie of Daric Barton.
My sample box also produced six regular, three Blue and two Green base card Refractors, along with a Black Refractor rookie and a Lance Broadway autographed Refractor.
Autographed Cards
The autographed MLB Rookie Cards account for a large portion of the signatures in this product, but not all of them. Finest Moments Autographs are a staple of the brand, gathering autographs from 30 players who did something big in 2007. Topps mainstays like Ryan Howard and David Wright help shore up a checklist that is solid but not especially breathtaking.
More signatures are available in the Franchise Favorites subset, which also comes in a dual autograph version. Rounding out the program are Dual Framed Autographed Cuts, which pair a signature from Mickey Mantle with that of a current Yankee on rare 1-of-1 cards.
With two autos coming from the first-year players, only one of my review mini boxes was going to produce something from this category. I ended up pulling a Finest Moments Autograph of Vladimir Guerrero, which like the rookies was also an on-card signature.
Insert Cards
Three different sets of regular insert cards round out the product. Topps Team Favorites looks at two players each from the Mets, Yankees, Cubs and A's, while Topps Team Dual Favorites puts them both together on one card. Team logos are the prominent elements in the backgrounds of these cards.
The bulk of the inserts come from Finest Moments, which takes 50 different MLB players and looks at their crowning achievements from the 2007 season. These come in the same rainbow of Refractor colors as the base cards, and several of the parallels should be found in a complete box.
Last but certainly not least, the Finest Rookie Redemption program makes a comeback for 2008. One out of every three mini boxes should contain an exchange card for one of ten players that will get Finest MLB Rookie Cards later in the season. This program was popular in 2007, as Topps unveiled the cards one at a time as the weeks went by.
All told, I found an insert in every pack of my review box, pulling six regular Finest Moments and five assorted Refractors, five Topps Team Favorites, one Topps Team Dual Favorites and Rookie Redemption # 9.
The Last Word
Finest Baseball doesn't shake things up too drastically for 2008, sticking to a formula of autographs and Refractors that should be familiar to hobbyists who have collected the brand in the past. The on-card autographs are nice to see, but the design and content are very similar to what has come before.
That means Finest is likely to appeal mostly to people who are already fans of the brand. In its distinctive 2008 packaging - where the whole box unfolds to look like a stadium - it shouldn't be hard for those folks to find on the shelf to pick up a mini box or three.