First look: 2011 Topps Finest baseball cards
By Chris Olds | Baseball Editor
Topps revealed the basic product information and preview images for its 2011 Topps Finest baseball card set on Friday and there’s one notable thing missing — the manufactured letter patch autographs.
In their place? Autographs. On-card Rookie Card autographs.
Each 12-pack box will include one serial-numbered autographed Rookie Card signed directly on the card, one numbered autographed Rookie Dual Relic, two Finest Moments inserts and six parallel cards when it arrives in late September. As with past releases, Finest will have mini boxes — each with an autograph and six packs inside.
The preliminary checklist includes 19 rookie who will have the following Refractors and parallels: SuperFractor (1/1), Printing Plates, Purple (/5), Diecut Mosaic (/10), Red (/25), Gold (/59), Orange (/99), Green (/199), XFractor (/299) and the standard Refractor.
New this year are jumbo patch cards, which will have Orange (/10), Purple (/5) and SuperFractors (1/1), while there will be another helping of 60th Anniversary sigs and three insert sets: Finest Foundations, Finest Freshmen and Finest Moments.
The Finest Moments inserts also have an autographed Relic version — found one per case — which will consist of 18 veterans and be found with SuperFractors, Purple, Orange and standard Refractor versions.
For the 100-card base set, there will be 14 versions of each card. Canary Diamond, SuperFractors and the four 1/1 colors are the rarest, while Diecut Mosaic, Red, Gold, Orange, Green, XFractor and standard Refractors round out the field.
The rookies signing for the product, according to the preliminary checklist, include Brandon Belt, J.P. Arencibia, Freddie Freeman and Michael Pineda among others, while the autographed Dual Relic includes Jerry Sands, Mike Minor, Freeman, Jeremy Hellickson, Kyle Drabek, Brandon Beachy, Pineda, Darwin Barney, Julio Teheran and more. Autographed Jumbo patch cards will include Minor, Freeman, Hellickson, Pineda and more.
The Finest Moment autographs checklist will include Joe Mauer, Carl Crawford, Ryan Howard, Alex Rodriguez, Stephen Strasburg, Buster Posey, Jason Heyward, Cliff Lee and Roy Halladay among others.
Chris Olds is the editor of Beckett Baseball. Have a comment, question or idea? Send an e-mail to him at colds@beckett.com. Follow him on Twitter by clicking here.
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Strausburg Autos?? I am sure it’s a redemption. His arm is going to fall off after he gets back from his tommy John surgery to fill in all of the topps redemptions he currently has!! :)
When is it set to come out ?
Looks nice, but like Topps typically does, they’ll bait and switch us, then claim it’s all “a mistake” and send out one color jersey cards. Topps needs competition. Badly.
I don’t know – I kind of liked the letter autos. Of course, I like the Letterman set too. As a Rays fan, that patch looks awesome!
I love the look of this set!
It looks like there will be ample value to be had with this set and the patch cards are out of this world.
Can’t wait until Sept.
If Topps continues to distroy their competition by presenting 100’s of sets and insert sets, and
God knows what else, in its 2011 Topps cards. There are so many cards plus series 1 & 2 cards
who can afford too purchase them. This 2011 outburst of massive output of cards, will mark the
end of Topps. The professional card purchasers are outraged by their lack of responsibility to
everyone and mostly the young children. Things are tuff nowaday, just putting food on the table.
Then along comes Topps cards, with this redundant flooding of the card market. There is no
reasonable thought or answer but total GREED of Topps. I’m 75, and have been collecting cards
for many a years and have never encountered this type of business procedure in my life. I for one
will never purchase the Topps product again, and I hope other will follow.