We all want hard-signed autos, right? Welp, here’s an argument for stickers.

I opened a half-box of 2019 Finest baseball today (6-packs in a sealed inner box) and the auto I pulled was a Justus Sheffield blue refractor, serial numbered to /150. Not a horrible auto. Just one problem: Sheffield is shown as a Yankee even though he was traded from New York to Seattle in November.

The blue refractor technology would have looked great on a Mariners auto of Sheffield, but instead I am looking at yet another auto of a player who no longer plays for New York. But we all know why this card exists … it exists in this form because Topps made the card before the trade and had Sheffield sign them instead of re-making them. (Jake Bauers is also shown on his old team on his Finest auto.)

This is why Sheffield is a Yankees on autos in Bowman as a Chrome auto, in Definitive, and in other Topps products released to date. I don’t blame Topps entirely for this; I mean we the collectors are the ones lobbying for more hard-signed autos. And in order for that to work, the company needs to produce these cards and send them to athletes way in advance to have them signed and returned before pack-out. (For the record, the Sheffield and Bauer base rookie cards do show the players on their current teams.)

Of course, this puts us consumers in an interesting spot: Would we prefer the hard-signed autos showing players on an old team, or would we want to a sticker that can be placed on an updated card of the player showing the player on the current team?

If you ask me, this could have been a good use of a sticker. But how would Topps have known that the trade was going to happen? And what would Topps do with a backstock of hard-signed autos if they did re-create the cards and had Sheffield sign a new batch?

I agree with Topps in releasing the cards; it’s what they had as of the deadline they had for the product and it’s just not a smart business move to not release (i.e. destroy) inventory that was already created. It’s really just unfortunate that it exists in this format.

Fortunately for everyone it wasn’t one of the higher-valued prospects who was in this situation.

How was the rest of the break?

Refractors: Kris Bryant, Marcus Stroman

Blue Refractor: Cody Bellinger

Prized Performer: Justin Smoak

Mariano Rivera Die-Cut MR2

Blue Chips: Miles Mikolas, Trey Mancini

Rookies: Eloy Jimenez, Cedric Mullins, Corbin Burnes, Touki Toussaint, DJ Stewart, Steven Duggar, Ryan O’Hearn, Rowdy Tellez

Base: Mookie Betts, Salvador Perez, Marcus Stroman, Paul Dejong, Jose Abreu, Willy Adames, Whit Merrifield, Josh Bell, Mitch Haniger Ozzie Albies, Ronald Guzman, Kris Bryant, Trea Turner, and Max Scherzer

Anyone have Kershaws from this set? Everything above is available.

This entry was posted on June 5, 2019 at 7:10 pm and is filed under Box / Pack Break with tags baseball, baseball cards, Finest, Justus Sheffield, sports, sticker auto, Topps. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.