In 2007, collectors had to wait a little bit longer than usual for Topps Baseball. It's back toward the beginning of the calendar for 2008, releasing well in advance of the baseball season and getting a 180 degree facelift from last season's black-bordered cards.
Hobby boxes of 2008 Topps Series 1 or 2 Baseball come in a familiar configuration, with 36 packs of ten cards each. Jumbo boxes contain 10 packs of 46 cards each. Series 2 hobby boxes contain one relic (memorabilia) card or autograph on average.
Series 1 Base Cards and Parallels
If you didn't care for the look of the 2007 Topps Baseball set, you're in luck: Topps changed things up drastically for 2008. Black borders have been replaced by a white frame, with the team name in colored circles across the top that looks retro yet doesn't call to mind any specific past set. Player names and the company logo are done in silver foil.
The full color backs have complete career stats as always, and are easier to read set against a white background. The 330 cards in the Series 1 base set include veterans, managers, league leaders, playoff highlights, award winners and 30 cards with the MLB Rookie Card logo.
Parallels are fairly common but still kept to a sane amount. Gold foil cards simply replace the silver foil with gold and fall a little more than one every other pack. Other parallels change the entire border color, with Gold (numbered to 2008), Black (hobby-only and numbered to 57) and Platinum (1-of-1) levels available.
A random Series 1 hobby box opened for this review yielded 301 of the 330 base cards with just one duplicate. I also pulled 20 gold foil and four Gold parallels.
Series 1 Insert Cards
A mix of returning and new insert sets awaits in 2008 Topps Baseball. Perennial favorite Own the Game is back with 25 new foil-accented cards. Mickey Mantle Home Run History and The Mickey Mantle Story each return from last season with additional cards, which could be good or bad for collectors interested in those subsets.
This year's continuity insert (which will run through Topps Series 1, 2 and Updates and Highlights) is called Year in Review, a fairly self-explanatory set that covers 2007 highlights with cards that look like the front page of a newspaper. The interesting twist is that when the 180-card set is complete, it will have a highlight from each day of the previous MLB season.
Two inserts that celebrate the legacy of baseball cards are the Topps 50th Anniversary All-Rookie Team and Trading Card History. The latter is especially cool, as it's a 50-card set putting today's players on memorable designs from the past. It even helps promote card stores, as the final 25 cards are only available at Topps Home Team Advantage stores - a different card each week. The lone drawback? The cards don't say which set they are paying tribute to, so they aren't as useful as a teaching tool as they could be.
Finally, Campaign 2008 cards look like base cards but picture 12 of the men and women who campaigned to become the next President of the United States. That includes all three people still in the running at the time of this review.
My review box contained 36 insert cards in all - one per pack - with at least two cards from every insert set listed in this section.
Series 1 Relic Cards and Autographed Cards
Series 1 boasts quite a few autograph and relic cards, though as noted in the introduction, you aren't guaranteed to find any except in jumbo boxes. Some are upgraded versions of the insert cards, as there are signed and memorabilia versions of the 50th Anniversary All-Rookie Team cards, as well as Mickey Mantle Home Run History Relics.
Others are different. On the relic side, there are World Champion Relics, with game-worn pieces from the 2007 Boston Red Sox (also available in autographed versions) and 2007 Highlight Relics spotlighting notable players from that season. The rarest relic cards are the In the Name Relics, which capitalize on an increasingly popular trend and present an entire letter from a player's game-worn jersey - in this case, a 2007 All-Star Game jersey - and are limited to one copy apiece.
Following with recent Topps tradition, several inserts focus on U.S. history and politics. The Presidential Stamp Collection is a series of 30 different cards that contain real postage stamps of 15 different U.S. presidents. And Campaign 2008 Cut Signatures, which are low-numbered cut signature cards of Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, John McCain, Barack Obama and Fred Thompson, just may be the hottest cards in all of Series 1. At the time of this review, Clinton and Obama cards had already commanded four-digit prices on the secondary market.
As is the case with many regular hobby boxes, my review box contained no relics or autographed cards.
Series 2 Base Cards and Parallels
Series 2 doubles the size of the base set with 330 more cards, mixing veterans, managers, All Star cards and MLB Rookie Cards. Parallels are similar to Series 1 with the addition of Silk cards - and yes, that's exactly what it sounds like. They are numbered to 50 and encased in a special frame for durability reasons.
A random Series 2 hobby box produced 269 base cards with 28 duplicates. On the parallel front, I pulled 18 gold foil cards and seven Gold cards.