Enjoying False Nostalgia

Perhaps it's a bit harsh to call the sets using old time designs as false nostalgia, but that is the best terms I can come up with for those sets.  I'm clearly not the only one who likes these sets since Topps keeps putting out the Heritage, Turkey Red, and Allen & Ginter sets each year.

As I mentioned yesterday, I really like the A&G sets.  In my repack adventures, I came across Upper Deck's contribution to the fake nostalgia game -- the Goudey set.  Intrigued, I grabbed a box online.

Overall, I like the product.  My main complaint with the box were the seemingly completely unrelated insert sets.  I got two of the "Hit Parade of Champions" cards -- Carl Yastrzemski and Patrick Roy.

At about half the size of a regular card, they are a neat little photo card.  The problem I have is that they appear entirely unrelated to anything in the regular set, anything harkening back to the regular set, or really anything to do with the pack they came in other than that, well, that's the pack they came in.

The second group of inserts in their design ties back to the popular Goudey Sport Kings set; in 2008, they were called Sport Royalty.  Perhaps the problem with these cards is that they are too updated for their own good -- maybe Upper Deck should have mimicked what Topps does with A&G and make the photos look more like canvas art or lithography.

 

These are not bad looking cards -- well, okay, the pea green with blue swimsuit for Janet Evans is a particularly unattractive color combination -- but the photos are almost too exact or perfect when compared to an original.

The insert that made the least sense in terms of its inclusion in Goudey packs -- though I'm sure it made perfect sense in the climate that was 2008's closing of the House that Ruth Built  -- were the Yankee Legacy cards.  I think the reason several of these appeared was because Upper Deck had too many of the cards and dumped them into the Goudey sorters.

These are reasonably decent looking cards, but they have nothing to do with Goudey other than (a) Upper Deck was printing both in 2008 and (b) the 1934 Goudey had the "Lou Gehrig Says" (and "Chuck Klein Says") banners on the card front.  

Yet another insert within this box was the appearance of a single presidential card.

James Buchanan is not a superstar card in the world of Presidents.  Indeed, if the roster of American presidents can be likened to baseball players, we would probably look at George Washington as being something like Cy Young -- setting the bar so high for future generations that no one can reach those heights. Abraham Lincoln could be seen as akin to Babe Ruth or Lou Gehrig, in that he changed the way people thought about the Presidency in a way that Ruth changed the way that baseball people thought about how scoring runs should or could be accomplished (and, his life ended tragically much in the same way that Lou Gehrig's life did).

But Buchanan?  Well, he's sort of like a Jim Gantner type to me.  He spent 8 years in office -- so long career -- but no one ever mistook either one for being a superstar.

That's a long, tortured analogy to say that I wasn't impressed with getting the Buchanan card.

Oh, there were some baseball cards in these packs too.  I got a nice PED soaked relic:

"Look at the size of that syringe!"

To be fair to Tejada, he's tested positive twice for amphetamines (Adderall, to be exact), and he said he never used the HGH that he bought.  Yeah, surrrrrrrrrre.

I also ripped a nice Braves autograph:

I never understood why Bobby Cox and John Schuerholz didn't like Johnson more than they did.  Johnson has good pop in his bat and has a pretty good batting eye.  He's with the Yankees this year, so maybe his cards will enjoy a New York bounce.  

Finally, I also got a couple of serial numbered cards.  It took me a while to figure out what the variation was here, but it's the color of the print on the backs of the cards.  First, the Hall of Famer:

In my head, Hunter is a Yankee because that was who he played for in my first baseball memories.  But, here he is with the A's on a card numbered 8 of 88.

The other cards is one for the Dodger crowd, and it's numbered 18 of 34:

Billingsley is coming off Tommy John surgery (RIP, Dr. Jobe) last year and is suffering from a little soreness in his elbow after bringing his curve ball back into his repertoire.  

All in all, I like the Goudey base set.  I'm not a fan of all the randomness that Upper Deck included within the packs besides the Goudey base set.  But, I'd probably buy a box again if a cheap one came up.