2008 Topps Box Break - Packs 1-4

Pack 1 can be seen in its entirety on A Pack A Day. Best card in the pack is a Joe Mauer wearing a sweet throwback Twins helmet. Theres also one of the last Mantle Home Run Mirrors (hooray!) and a new Rookie Cup advertisement card. In typical Topps style, the website they are advertising on the card goes to a 404 message. It's odd seeing Ryan Klesko with a Giants uniform. Somebody better sign him, I don't want his last card to be catching a pop-up.

Pack 2:
302 Horacio Ramirez
129 Kevin Hart RC
220 Roy Oswalt
88 Jack Cust
6 Felix Pie
321 JR Towles RC
OTG14 Ryan Howard Own the Game
103 Gold Foil Jonathon Albaladejo RC
Checklist 1
230 Roy Halladay
125 Tim Hudson

First Brave: Tim Hudson. That means 21 wins and a Cy, count on it. This pack has a solid rotation between Huddy, Oswalt and Halladay. The Own the Games are shiny as usual and have a familiar feel to them. An unholy mix of '82 Topps, '84 Topps and a refractor. Horacio Ramirez is standing in front of a wall. in front of a firing squad, presumably. The JR Towles card has the same photo used on his '07 Bowman Heritage card. I didn't notice it until the 4th or 5th time I looked at it, but the Albaladejo card has gold foil instead of silver. Oh, goody, another parallel. I'm just gonna sneak that one into the set and look the other way. At least the pack had 10 cards in it, I think it was originally supposed to have 9.

Pack 3:
62 Rich Thompson RC
116 Chuck James
187 Dustin McGowan
79 Omar Vizquel
165 Tim Lincecum
22 Ron Washington
MHR531 Mickey Mantle Home Run #531
96 Sam Fuld RC
221 Ian Snell
277 Aubrey Huff

Second Brave: Chuck James. To be honest if he avoids Tommy John surgery this year I think we'll be doing great. Another Mantle Home Run card pack filler. I have come to the conclusion that team names with six letters looks best with these circle logos. Some of them start to get squished real quick. The Nationals barely fits on the cards and I'm not sure what Diamondbacks is going to look like. This must be why the Rays changed their name. Devils would have looked better and more accurately describes the hell that franchise has put their fans through. I like the way Ron Washington and Aubrey Huff's cards look.


Pack 4:
140 Brandon Webb
180 Jose Valverde
231 Casey Blake
188 Kei Igawa
175 Delmon Young
87 Macier Izturis
OTG23 Brandon Webb
225 Gold Foil Hunter Pence
Topps of the Class card - David Wright
297 Jorge Posada
159 Luke Scott

Well that explains how they fit Diamondbacks in the title. Cheaters! All the fuss over huge borders was for naught as these cards all have normal borders. This is the Brandon Webb hot pack. Could be worse I suppose. There's another easily missable gold foil card here in Hunter Pence. I guess they hit at one every two packs. For the record, I'm breaking the box in layers - these were the top four packs in the box, I'll go to the next four underneath next and so on. I'm trying to keep an eye out for strangeness, missing signatures, reverse negatives, goobers photoshopped in the background, that sort of thing. Haven't found anything yet. One thing you can;t miss is the ubiquitous Top of the Class filler card that have been in packs for years with no change. They've changed 'em all right - David Wright's smiling face is cheering kids on to do well in school. I hope David's not on every single one of those cards this year... That would gget tedious to pull a damn Met in every other pack. They have other spokesmen too, get A-Rod or Big Papi on some of those cards. How awesome would it be to have a card where Manny Ramirez promoted education??


The box so far:

Base cards - 34
Checklists - 1
Dupes - 0

Parallels:
Gold Foil - 2

Inserts:
Own The Game - 2 - Howard & Webb
Mantle Home Runs - 2 - 531, 533