Talking Chop: The 420 Dollar Baseball Card Gamble

I’ll just stick with my pile of relicky, stinkpit Hal Reniff cards. Thank you.

2012 Topps Five Star Baseball might just be the ultimate gamble. Right now, a box sells for around four-hundred and twenty dollars. That will get you a single pack with only six cards. What will the gamble get you? According to the Topps sell sheet for the product, this is what you will get:

  1 Base Card
  1 Autograph Card of an Active Player
  1 Autograph Card of a Retired Player
  1 Autographed Relic
  1 Autographed Book or Autograph
  1 Jumbo Jersey Relic, Patch, Bat Plate or Bat Knob

The sell sheet is rife with pictures of beautiful cards. You could pull Sandy Koufax or Hank Aaron as your retired player autograph! You could get an autographed relic by rookie phenom Bryce Harper! You could get an ultra-amazing, 1 of 1, spectacular Babe Ruth cut autograph as your autograph book! Your jumbo relic could be a Lou Gehrig name plate from an actual, game used Lou Gehrig bat! Each of these cards is beautiful and worthy of the hype. (Well, except for the Harper card. That’s a clown card bro.) You might even pull the Aaron or the Koufax. (It should be noted that, unlike the cards pictured on the sell sheet, these cards seem to have almost universally rough edges. This is being attributed to amount of handling they go through as hard signed material. As always with Topps, there are also a number of redemptions, but these seem to have been kept to a minimum for a change.)