It's Officially Ridiculous

Can we all agree that Kosuke Fukudome, for better or worse, is the premiere rookie card this year? Jay Bruce is nice, and Johnny Cueto was hot for about 15 minutes, but Kosuke is the closest thing we've gotten to a "hot" rookie, right? Evan Longoria is better, and will be better for a long time, but he's got a bunch of Bowman cards from 2006 out there. As far as a player whose first card is from 2008 (except for Japanese issues, but I'm not counting those), it's Kosuke.


So far this year, I have pulled exactly zero Kosuke cards from Topps products. From Upper Deck, I've pulled ten. Four from Upper Deck Series 2, Four from Goudey, One from UD Heroes and finally this mini card parallel from Goudey. Upper Deck 10, Topps 0. How is that even possible? I know I buy a lot of cards, but damn. And I don't even like Fukudome or the Cubs. Topps has printed up a bunch of Fukus of their own, they just short printed them all to hell and put most of them in WBC international uniforms. Great for generating buzz and getting people to spend lots of money on cards in the secondary market, but now they seem to have a distinct Fukudome gap. The only one that isn't short printed so far is Bowman Chrome, but at three cards per pack that product is kind of inherently short printed. I guess Topps is fully embracing the philosophy that the chase is more important than the cards themselves.