Review: 2008 UD Documentary Baseball

Fresh off its success with the enormous Yankee Stadium Legacy set, Upper Deck presents another huge collecting challenge with UD Documentary Baseball. With one card for each game played by all 30 MLB teams, the 4,980-card base set literally captures the entire 2008 season.

Hobby boxes of 2008 UD Documentary Baseball contain 24 15-card packs. Each pack contains one Gold parallel card and each box contains one Seasonal Signatures autograph card.

With Documentary Baseball, the base set is by far the most important part of the product. And what a base set it is too, with 166 cards for each of the 30 MLB teams.

The card design is simple, with no borders on the sides of the photos and simple two-color bars at the top and bottom. Instead of identifying the player in the photo, the bottom bar tells the viewer which game of the team's season is the focus, as well as the score of the game and a one-sentence highlight.

On the back, there's a box score from the game in question and a little more information on how it went down. Two separate card numbering systems appear in the upper-left corner: one numbers the card out of the entire 4,980-card base set, and the other numbers the card out of the specific team's portion of the set. It's a nice touch that allows collectors to more easily focus on single teams if putting together the whole set seems too daunting.

Gold parallels (seeded one per pack) have a big "2008" stamp on the front to identify them. It would be hard to imagine anyone trying to collect the whole parallel set, but perhaps some team collectors will bite on assembling team sets.

As one can imagine, one box of Documentary barely makes a dent in the full set. I opened a random box and found 317 regular cards plus the expected 24 Gold parallels.

Inserts may seem a little superfluous in a set like this, but they are kept to a reasonable level and fit with the Documentary theme. Falling about 1:4 packs are 55 All-Star Game cards and five Home Run Derby Moments cards, which are fairly self-explanatory. They have silver foil logos in the center which help them stand out at a glance.

Upper Deck's other massive 2008 set, the Yankee Stadium Legacy insert set that has run through the whole baseball line, makes one of its most prominent appearances with cards in every other pack.

The About.com sample box was right on the money with inserts, producing 12 Yankee Stadium Legacy, and six total All-Star Game and Home Run Derby cards.

One autograph per box is truly just a bonus in this brand, and the signatures are limited to a single set called Seasonal Signatures. The 60-card checklist is heavy on rookies and young up-and-comers, but Upper Deck did manage to sneak Derek Jeter and Ken Griffey Jr. in there too.

I found the expected lone autograph in my review box, signed by St. Louis Cardinals pitcher Kyle McClellan.

It almost goes without saying that this is not a set that will appeal to everyone. It is very well done though, especially for a brand's debut, and it takes the feeling of capturing a specific slice of time that all baseball cards can give and takes it to its logical extreme.

The expectation is that team collectors will be into this, putting together 166-card team runs (especially Phillies fans), but if Yankee Stadium Legacy taught the hobby anything, it's that someone, somewhere, will attempt the entire Documentary master set. Kudos to anyone who does it, and enjoy what will likely be the finest resource for the 2008 MLB season that doesn't involve the internet.