Review: 2006 UD Future Stars Baseball

UD Future Stars is a new brand of baseball cards cooked up by Upper Deck for the 2006 season. As the name implies, the emphasis is on the stars of tomorrow, with the packaging touting five rookie card autographs per box on clear plastic cards.

A box of 2006 UD Future Stars Baseball contains 24 packs with four cards per pack.

Cards of 75 MLB players make up the common card portion of the Future Stars base set. The card fronts feature foil board with a star-themed background that was a little distracting for my tastes. Card backs are clean with 10 seasons of statistics for each player.

My review box produced 45 of the 75 commons with 14 duplicates. There are also six parallel levels for the common cards with varying print runs. I pulled eight purple parallels numbered to 1799, three green parallels numbered to 499 and one silver parallel numbered to 50.

The plastic autographed cards are also numbered as part of the base set, but as the big draw of this product they are covered in their own section of this review below.

The Clear Path to Greatness Signatures make up the remainder of the base set, and the name is fitting as the cards are made from clear plastic that allows the image of the player to be seen from the front or back. The autograph itself is on a transparent sticker and can only be viewed from the front.

Though the signature cards sport the MLB Rookie Card logo, many of the players depicted have had previous RCs. The regular blue ink autographs are not numbered, and my review box produced the expected five signatures. There is also a parallel version signed in red ink and numbered to 35.

Upper Deck has announced that the blue ink autograph cards of the following players are short prints:

• # 86 - Chad Billingsley
• # 89 - Conor Jackson
• # 95 - Luis Figueroa
• # 98 - Hanley Ramirez
• # 101 - Nelson Cruz
• # 106 - Jered Weaver
• # 109 - Joel Zumaya
• # 118 - Justin Verlander
• # 123 - Martin Prado
• # 131 - Jeremy Sowers
• # 136 - Melky Cabrera
• # 147 - Jon Lester
• # 148 - Craig Hansen
• # 152 - Alay Soler
• # 156 - Choo Freeman

UD Future Stars has one additional chase for autograph collectors: the Clear Path to History Triple Signatures insert set. These clear cards sport autographs from three MLB players, but none were found in my sample box.

Upper Deck makes use of its World Baseball Classic license with the World Future Stars insert, picturing players from various countries that participated in the WBC. The inserts fall one per pack on average and have the same six parallel levels as the common base cards.

My sample box yielded 20 of the regular inserts, including WBC MVP Daisuke Matsuzaka, two purple parallels numbered to 1799, one green parallel numbered to 499 and one red parallel numbered to 299.

There's no denying that the clear signature cards are cool, though the concept has been used before by Upper Deck and others. They're seeded generously at five per box, but the checklist consists entirely of first-year players and young rising stars, ensuring that they will appeal mostly to collectors who like to speculate on the future. WBC inserts were popular at the beginning of the season, but the tournament is fading from memory this late in the 2006 collecting year and doesn't really fit with the rest of the set's forward-looking theme.

UD Future Stars Baseball is a concept with some real promise and decent if unspectacular execution. With a few tweaks and the increase in true rookie cards that 2007 baseball sets are almost certain to see, I can see this as an even better part of Upper Deck's baseball lineup if it returns next year.