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Topnotchsy
Featured Contributor, The best players in history?
- Aug 7, 2008
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Upper Deck chose to use the A Piece of History 500 Club theme for some of their inserts in the 2009 UD Ballpark release. These included dual player bat cards (with a dual autograph parallel) and 3, 4, 6 and 8 piece/player jersey cards. Here are my thoughts:
For a long time I've felt that UD was sitting on a treasure not exploiting the following they had with the original APOH set. With the way they released the Manny, Thome and Thomas cards (as 1 per case as opposed to /350) I thought that they were doing a very good job of destroying that potential value , and wished that someone there with some semblance of business sense would be allowed to make some decisions relating to the set.
With Ballpark they've put out some great looking cards. The downsides though are many in my opinion. The biggest is the sheer number of varieties they offer. When the set was originally released, each player had a single card (outside of the "big three" triple card which few even knew existed.) This enabled people to collect them by picking them up one at a time. Having so many now in one set makes that far more challenging. This brings us to a second negative:
The print run. While the low print runs will keep the prices for dropping too low, they also pretty much eliminate the chance for someone who built the original POH 500 club set from going for these. Print runs like /10 and /15 do not offer much of a chance to masses of people who chased the /350 original set. The print run means that there simply are not enough copies.
The player combinations chosen (seemingly at random based on what I've seen, though I may be wrong) leave room for many sets going forward to offer similar cards with different player combinations, something that any considering attempting to piece together the set may see as a real deterrent.
All in all they are nice looking cards, but I think UD's marketing team took a real swing and a miss here, as they've completely missed the giant target (of set-builders of the original APOH set) that they had waiting for them. It's quite unfortunate as they've pretty much ruined their opportunities to exploit it with this release (and the release last year of the "APOH 600 Griffey card" that done right could have expanded on the idea really nicely.)
So that people do not think I'm simply ranting with no better idea, here's simple way that could have had these cards bringing far more dough.
All that had to be done was release just a few different cards (possibly between 1-4) with the dual players that they did release, and then with an auto'd parallel (which they have for the dual bat cards.) Instead of making the cards /10 or /15, having them /350 would mean that there's one for every set builder. Since they are only releasing a few cards at a time, the /350 would not mean a massive influx of cards, they'd still be a really tough pull. This way the set collectors (and anyone else interested in the cards) could target them one (or two) at a time, making it most realistic for a normal budget, and more reasonable for someone who is not sitting on eBay buying every variation to come out in the set. Releasing this way would allow the set collectors who created the market for the set as is, to keep going.
Another point, I think the 3,4,6 and 8 player jersey cards are way, way overkill and think the company would have done way better to offer APOH 500 club single player jersey cards that are a parallel to the bat cards. Not sure why this was not done but then again, there's so many questions here...
For a long time I've felt that UD was sitting on a treasure not exploiting the following they had with the original APOH set. With the way they released the Manny, Thome and Thomas cards (as 1 per case as opposed to /350) I thought that they were doing a very good job of destroying that potential value , and wished that someone there with some semblance of business sense would be allowed to make some decisions relating to the set.
With Ballpark they've put out some great looking cards. The downsides though are many in my opinion. The biggest is the sheer number of varieties they offer. When the set was originally released, each player had a single card (outside of the "big three" triple card which few even knew existed.) This enabled people to collect them by picking them up one at a time. Having so many now in one set makes that far more challenging. This brings us to a second negative:
The print run. While the low print runs will keep the prices for dropping too low, they also pretty much eliminate the chance for someone who built the original POH 500 club set from going for these. Print runs like /10 and /15 do not offer much of a chance to masses of people who chased the /350 original set. The print run means that there simply are not enough copies.
The player combinations chosen (seemingly at random based on what I've seen, though I may be wrong) leave room for many sets going forward to offer similar cards with different player combinations, something that any considering attempting to piece together the set may see as a real deterrent.
All in all they are nice looking cards, but I think UD's marketing team took a real swing and a miss here, as they've completely missed the giant target (of set-builders of the original APOH set) that they had waiting for them. It's quite unfortunate as they've pretty much ruined their opportunities to exploit it with this release (and the release last year of the "APOH 600 Griffey card" that done right could have expanded on the idea really nicely.)
So that people do not think I'm simply ranting with no better idea, here's simple way that could have had these cards bringing far more dough.
All that had to be done was release just a few different cards (possibly between 1-4) with the dual players that they did release, and then with an auto'd parallel (which they have for the dual bat cards.) Instead of making the cards /10 or /15, having them /350 would mean that there's one for every set builder. Since they are only releasing a few cards at a time, the /350 would not mean a massive influx of cards, they'd still be a really tough pull. This way the set collectors (and anyone else interested in the cards) could target them one (or two) at a time, making it most realistic for a normal budget, and more reasonable for someone who is not sitting on eBay buying every variation to come out in the set. Releasing this way would allow the set collectors who created the market for the set as is, to keep going.
Another point, I think the 3,4,6 and 8 player jersey cards are way, way overkill and think the company would have done way better to offer APOH 500 club single player jersey cards that are a parallel to the bat cards. Not sure why this was not done but then again, there's so many questions here...
