Product Review: 2008 Topps Sterling Baseball

Topps Sterling, amazing checklist, very little value, that’s what this product's tagline should be for collectors. I mean you pay a whopping 250 dollars at the least for 1 hit, not multiple hits, 1 fucking hit, and it could be an Eddie Murray jersey card. The good thing is that it also could be a Babe Ruth cut, but the odds are so much against you, its better to buy boxes of Legendary Cuts and hope for the best at that price.

The Good

Ill admit it, with the CMG players, the checklist is pretty good. Cobb, Ruth, Mantle, Robinson, its basically a who' who of the major hall of famers. They even threw in some pre-war players that don’t usually get stuff in these products due to scarcity. Ill give them that.

Another amazing part of this set is the jumbo patch and jumbo patch auto cards. Last year they were out of 10, but this year they all seem to be 1/1s which is good and sucky at the same time. The good thing is that these patches are usually like 25 colors and the space usually affords places for an ENTIRE patch on the card. Its completely awesome. If you manage a player who is still alive, the Patch Autos add a really nice touch to things. However, at 1 per case now, these could be quite substandard.

Looking at the packaging, its awesome. I love the white wood box, and I think it makes a good statement. Packaging is very underrated these days, and I give them props for doing this well.

The Bad

This product is basically higher end triple threads with better players and less hits, and the windows spell out weirder shit, but ill get to that later. I cannot understand why anyone would decide this is the product for them to bust. I cannot understand why Triple Threads is so popular either. Topps blows giant whale balls at high end product and this is reason number one: THEY GIVE YOU NOTHING FOR YOUR MONEY!

At one hit per box, this could be the worst high end break of all time. There is no reason to spend even 200 dollars on one hit, unless you are SURE its one of the old CMG players. Half of the relics for the good people are bats, and the cards don’t even look that good. Your chances at cuts are ridiculous, and the product has enough bad pulls on the checklist that it wont matter.

On top of all this, the price tag on better products is lower, and you get WAAAAAAAY more stuff for your buy. Its like paying 250,000 for a Ferrari box on wheels, when you can have the fully loaded Ferrari at a different dealer for 150,000. It just doesn’t make any sense. Yet, people go nucking futs over this shit because they are too stupid to realize the crap they are buying.

Lastly, its sad that we are cutting up Honus Wagner bats and Jackie Robinson jerseys for this stuff. Its not a good idea. I am all for the historical significance of these jerseys and bats, mainly because so many people would cherish them, rather than destroying them. I can imagine that there are not many relics left to chop, and that makes me sad for future people who wont get to see them as a whole piece.

The Ugly

I have no fucking clue what half of the diecuts mean. 140 sac bunts? .987 OPS 1963? 500 IBBs 1943? Cmon, this stuff is crazy. How about getting someone to think of better things to carve out of these windows. If I was in the market for some sterling, I busted a box and got a Babe Ruth, only for the windows to spell out something like 33 WS 4 HITS or something crazy weird like that, I would be mad. Is it too tough to spell out "Bambino"?



What this excess of weird carvings creates is a fucking gross amount of 1/1s. I bet there are close to 100 1/1s for each CMG player and even more for people like Seaver, Palmer, Gwynn, etc who are younger. That just plain fucking sucks. Topps has made it their mission over the last 4 years to destroy the integrity of the 1/1. They wont be satisfied until every card they make has 200 1/1 parallels. Not only does the abundance of 1/1s devalue the box break even more, it fuels the idiots who buy this crap. That means this product stays around, gross.

The last thing I want to talk about is the foldouts. Why Topps continually resorts to this stupidity is beyond me. They are impossible to display in protected holders, they usually spell out the weirdest possible things ever, and the design for these makes it obvious that they designed two cards, put two of the same pictures on them, connected them together, and knew that Lettermen football loving joe collectors everywhere would kill people to get them. I have even devised a fomula:

Low IQ + Low Hobby IQ x Number of boxes of Lettermen or Triple Threads Bought = Likelihood To Buy A Product With Ugly and/or Poorly Conceived Cards

Before buying Topps Sterling, remember that if a Topps product is over 100 bucks, stay FAAAAR away.