Upcoming Goodwin Champions baseball set includes paintings, presidents … and even more bugs

By Chris Olds | Baseball Editor

We’re in the heart of the baseball season, so Upper Deck is right in the thick of its baseball release calendar as well.

First, 2011 SP Legendary Cuts arrives this week but on Tuesday Upper Deck pulled back the curtain a bit further on a product that will arrive on July 5, packing a whole lot besides baseball.

It teased a bit more about 2011 Goodwin Champions.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0EF9D3WoB3g[/youtube]

As previously seen here, there will be plenty of big-name autographs from around the sports world and even more of what collectors would expect to find from a product that included the world’s first entomology trading cards — actual dead insects inside of a shadowboxed trading card — back in 2009.

Upper Deck’s Grant Sandground, a Beckett alum, offered collectors a behind-the-scenes peek at precisely what’s in store in the product — oil paintings on each and every base card, actual painted cards of American Presidents found inside packs and, of course, a bigger, badder dose of bugs.

See it all in the video above.

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.