2001 Upper Deck Legends - Relic Cards

There are a few reasons why I chose 2001 Upper Deck Legends as my 'designated Upper Deck set to fawn over and stick it up Topps' butt for screwing up my '08 set with needless short prints' feature this month. I love pretty much all the Upper Deck Legends sets, from the 1999 Century Legends set that started it all by counting down the Sporting News' Top 50 players, to last year's SP Legendary cuts set with the gorgeous black borders. It's a shame this years' set screwed it up by short printing all the legends. The 2001 set might be my favorite though. The wood grain and black borders look great, there are legendary players along with current players in the set, and best of all I've got a few of the relic cards out of the set to show off. Here's a Chipper Bat card:


Check out the little stitches burned into the bat chip, now that's classy. You don't see that on today's bat cards. Actually does anyone even do bat cards anymore? It seems like everything is jerseys and autographs nowadays save the autographed quad relic cards with a bat chip along with a pice of a jersey, a patch and a Mitchell Report used urine sample cup that you only get in $300 a pack products. Come to think of it, Allen & Ginter had bat cards last year and Heritage had 'em this year. They didn't have no little burned in stitches though! Here's a jersey card:


No stitches except for the ones in the cloth here. I like the long skinny swatch at the bottom of the card, it looks a lot better than the square chunks that are usually used. The design looks better without the swatch eating into the player photo. Both relic cards are well done, the variations on the basic wood/black/red theme really look nice. The Chipper card here is pretty spectacular what with his smirk and all. It looks like Chipper is desperately trying to keep from spewing sunflower seeds in laughter after Smoltzie tried ironing his shirt again. Here's a more serious looking bat card of Andruw:

I want to pull out my bat cards and my old wood burning kit and start putting little stitches on all the round bat pieces now. I think homemade stitches or maybe smiley faces on bat cards should improve a card's PSA score at least two grades. Do they still sell wood burning kits anymore? Apparently so! I remember being given one for Christmas. What a wonderful gift for a child - a toy designed to get so hot that it actually chars wood. I was never creative or destructive enough to try mine on the wood paneling though. Those were the days... Wood burning kits, model rockets, junior mad scientist chemistry sets, Jarts and The Visible Woman model where you got to see her boobs from the inside. You give those toys to a kid today and you GO TO JAIL. FOREVER. This bat card isn't as interesting as that stuff, but if you look closely, the wood on the bottom of the card looks like it was left out in the sun or something and it's faded to pink. The card has been buried in my Braves box in the basement since I got it, so the eBay seller I bought it from must have been the one performing dastardly experiments on the card. See what happens when you let kids grow up with crazy educational toys? Give your kid a nice safe art toy instead like some Aqua Dots. Or maybe not. Just get the kid some bat cards and a wood burning kit and get ready to submit some cards to PSA. Gem mint 10s, baby!