2006 Bowman Originals; A Break From Yester-Year: Part I

I said previously that I'd eventually get to this, so here it is.  When I first started collecting baseball cards I tried my hand at a couple high-end products.  If you look at my non-Ginter hits page you'll see quite a few UD SPx cards floating around.  I'm not going to bother writing much on them as I certainly can't put the boxes that I opened back together and, to be honest, there wasn't all that much that was exciting.  The best hit I got was probably a Roger Clemens auto/relic who now has his name tainted.

I also opened up a couple packs of UD Sweet Spot where I got this really sweet Tori Hunter/Joe Nathan dual autograph on what looks and feels to be a piece of glove (but probably isn't).

However, by far my favorite high end product I ever opened had to be the single box of 2006 Bowman Originals.  Don't ask me how much I spent on it... I don't remember.  I do know that they’re going for around $260 now.  A box of this comes with 6 packs featuring 7 cards each and guarantying 2 autographs per pack.  Here’s a couple of the autos to get us started.

The autos are all similar; they are buybacks that the player signed and were then hand-numbered to some crazy number… who knows how they decided.  I’m not really sure how I feel about the buyback part of it, though I guess it does guarantee that the card designs are different which is good because I hate some of them…

That's Sean West numbered 57/70 if you can't see it.

I suppose buybacks also guarantee that you’ll get cards of players who existed in the past and in 2006 (so they’re likely to be better and not completely irrelevant).  Speaking of irrelevant...

I suppose you still get some doozies.  But I said this was not only my favorite box, but also by far my best box of high-end product I ever touched.  It must have someone good?!?!

Certainly!  How about this?!?!  Of the 6 remaining autographs, 5 out of the 6 players featured are still on a big league ball club today!  We're talking about a 2006 product buying back cards from previous years.  You can do the math... most of the guys coming up are reaching 10 year veteran status, if not more!  Oh, and that 1 player that isn't playing anymore?  I guarantee he's somebody that every reader out there would recognize if they've followed baseball even casually in the last decade.

But guess what... I'm going to make you wait for the rest.  I'll also be doing a post on the base cards and parallels because (at least until very recently) I still have all of them sitting in a box collecting dust.  Rest assured though!  They're quite intriguing!