When Documentary came out last winter, I was intrigued by the idea of a set of baseball cards chronicling the entire MLB season. Then came the reviews and complaints of cards with pictures that didn't correlate to the game on the card- players wearing home unis for away games, players pictures who didn't play in the game, etc.
Documentary was never really on my radar, and those reviews pretty much knocked it off.
Fast forward to a couple weeks ago. I'm scanning Cubs sets on ebay and run across a Cubs set of UD Documentary, all 163 cards of the set. The price was decent, about 11¢ per card. And the Cubs did have a really good regular season, with the National League's best record. The set could be a nice scrapbook of the season.
I figured I would just watch the set and if no one bid on it, I would try to snag it. Well, no one did bid on it so I grabbed it at the last second for the minimum bid. Good deal!
Not really!! The set came last week and I started thumbing through the cards. I look at the first ten games, and yes, not all the pictures matched the game, but that was ok. Then I get to games 11-20.......and the same 10 pictures are used again. On to 21-30 and its the same thing.....and the pictures are in the same order! This continued up to game 100.
This exact same picture of Alfonso Soriano was on cards 1, 11, 21, 31, 41, 51, 61, 71, 81, and 91.
The same thing was true of 2.12....3,13... and so on.
The picture on the card has absolutely nothing to do with the game and everything to do with the pattern! That is absolutely ridiculous. I understand that it would be too costly for UD to have photographers at every single game. But AP did. If you are going to document the entire season, why not work out a deal with AP to use their pictures. Heck, you can put an AP logo on the cards. But at least make an effort to get pictures to match the game!
The pattern changed with cards 101-133. Now there are only three cards in the rotation, repeating every three. This Soriano picture shows up on 101, 104, 107, 110, 113, 116, 119, 122, 125, 128, and 131.
From 134 to 163, three more cards show up, again repeated every three.
And to top things off, this familiar looking shot of Rich Harden shows up 11 times.
Why familiar? Because shots from the same sequence also show up in 2009 Series 1, 2, and OPC.
I like Rich Harden, but I don't want to see another picture of him again!
And in the future, UD, if you are going to document the season, do it right. Use 162 pictures instead of only 16!!
I feel your pain. I purchased the UD 2007 Boston Red Sox Championship commemorative set and was massively dissapointed at the lack of variety in shots and "highlights" that had nothing to do with the pictures on the cards. In fact, most of the cards are just pictures of the players in front of a trippy backdrop. It was HORRIBLE. UD is so hit and miss for me. It seems they rock at artistic products, but absolutely suck at photography shots.
ReplyDeleteI actually built the Padres flopumentary set. Same thing there, only used 16 photos and changed at 100 to the same three photos over and over and over
ReplyDeleteWow. It's worse than I thought. I only bought one blaster box of this disaster, not enough cards to see the pattern.
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