A Swift Kick in the Nuts: 2008 Upper Deck Sweet Spot Baseball

For men, there's few feelings worse than a kick to the crotch. In fact, I can't think of anything right now. I'm just having flashbacks to the time when I was taking a break playing from a round of tennis sitting on a ledge and watching my friend practice serving. And with one swift swing of his racquet I watched the ball quickly land right at the top of the tee with just the right amount of top spin. From there the world went into slow motion. When it regained speed again I was on the ground, curled up in a ball with tears dripping down both my cheeks and a sharp pain in my stomach.

So let's see how much of a kick in the nuts my spontaneous pack of 2008 Sweet Spot Baseball was.

Price: $24.99 (Cdn.) for eight cards (so, a little over $3.00 per card).

 

  

  

 

The verdict:

This is why I don't buy the fancy packs. Sure, the players on the base cards are all pretty good (actually, I'm really digging seeing Jason Bay on the Red Sox) but the promised "hit" is a plain gray Markakis jersey.

Also the base design mixes the full bleed photography of 2008 Upper Deck Baseball with the embossed stiching of Upper Deck's old Ovation sets and finishes it off with the gold medallion from the 1995 Ultra Baseball parallels. Mashed potatoes, cherry pie and chocolate covered almonds all taste great but you don't go mixing them together. The same theory should apply here as well.

It's been probably a decade since I bought anything "high end" like this - if $25 is nowadays - and it'll be another decade at least most likely before I splurch again. I would have much rather had five packs of Goudey and had a small stack to put toward my set. Oh, well. Sometimes a kick in the nuts is nothing but your own fault.