Friday Five: Top 5 Sets from 2004

5. 2004 Fleer Showcase- I bought this box for my birthday during spring of 2004.  I remember rolling into 1,000,000 Baseball Cards in Ballwin, Missouri and picking up a box of this product.  It was National Trading Card Day and I was up for some free baseball cards, but while I was there I was not going to walk out empty handed.  This product had a cool looking design, decent autographs, and some cool insert sets like the Hot Gloves.  I got in on this product towards the end of its run, but unfortunately this was the end of line for this product.  Really cool product and my favorite fleer product from their later years (I am not counting the Upper Deck rehash).  

4. 2004 Topps Cracker Jacks- I love this set.  Is it the red backgrounds?  The minis?  Autographs?  Not sure, but I put together this whole set and have a bunch of the autographs and relics out of the product too.  The design is based on the 1914 Cracker Jacks set and has a lot of little quirks that were in the original: Writing on the back of the card upside down, old time players like Nap Lajoie, and Surprise Packs inside the boxes.  Not the most expensive set, and not the nice throwback set that Topps has ever put out, but still a very good product worth checking out.  

3.  2004 Diamond Kings- I like the Diamond Kings sets.  Donruss ran them several years in the early 2000s until the company came to an end in 2005.  The boxes are fun to open and there are a lot of cool serial numbered cards in this product.  Relics, autographs, lots of possibilities for player and teams collectors.  How many parallels made up this set?  It's huge and I am not sure that I have ever seen a collector put them altogether on a player.   The autographs are sticker autographs, which is a bummer, but many are inexpensive and pretty easy to find.  

2.  2004 Topps Heritage- This one is an easy one.  Hard to believe it only came in second on my list.  The Heritage set in 2004 was based on the 1955 Topps set.  One of my favorite old time sets.  Topps threw in a handful of short prints and some old logo variations.  Like all Heritage sets there are the usual autographs, relics, and serial numbered parallels.  Really great looking set.  

1.  2004 Bowman Heritage- 1955 was a great year for baseball cards.  The Bowman Heritage set was a redo of the 1955 Bowman set.  The television framed cards are a classic.  There are also some cool variations with black and white pictures.  Again, there are autographs, but one of my favorite aspects of this set was the fact that Topps added umpire autographs.  There have been a few umpires included in sets here and there, but this set had a really good run of umps.  

Orange Wall Sweet Sigs

I saw a really cool card last week on Ebay while picking up a few cards from a seller.  I love combined shipping and the price for this card was really low, so I swooped in and won the auction.  The card is a Troy Glaus, former Cardinal, and hails from the 2001 Fleer Showcase Sweet Sigs set.  The premise of the autograph set was that there were different materials players signed their autographs on.  Some of the different variations include wood and leather, which are pretty common with this type of autograph.  However, this Glaus card is pretty unique and eye catching.

2001 Fleer Showcase Sweet Sigs Troy Glaus Wall Autograph

I am not sure if the wall on this card is specifically a piece of the wall from Anaheim Stadium or of its a generic relic or material that Fleer used for players to sign.  I am guessing that it is probably the latter, but I still love the silver paint pen signature over the orange piece of "wall".  I checked around on Ebay a little bit after winning this auction and found that many of the wall cards in this set have a similar look and a major flaw as seen below:

Don't look too hard for Miggy's signature on this card.  It is barely visible and is actually quite common on the Showcase Sweet Sigs Wall Edition autographs.  Really a little bit unfortunate since the Glaus is such a cool card, and are obviously pretty inexpensive cards.  It does seem that there are a few players with the orange backgrounds, like Glaus, who have better looking signatures that are actually legible.  Specifically, the Andruw Jones card looks really nice.  Too bad there is only one copy available for $20.