Card-Ola: 2009 Topps Ticket to Stardom

One box of 2009 Topps Ticket to Stardom Baseball (supplied by Topps)
20 packs per box; 12 cards per pack

The Video

Part One


Part Two



The Pulls

Base Set: 198 of 225 (88.00%)

short set: 198 of 200 (99.00%)
Rookies (1:45, numbered to 199): 0 of 25 (0.00%)

Parallels

20 Perforated (one-per-pack)
3 Blues (1:10, numbered to 99): KosFu, J. Hermida, D. Haren
1 Gold (1:20, numbered to 50): A. Kearns

Inserts

5 Ticket to Stardom (15 cards, 1:4): C. Maybin, M. Kemp, J. Bruce, J. Mauer, K. Kawakami
2 Big Tickets (15 cards, 1:8): D. Wright, J. Reyes
2 Season Veterans (ten cards, 1:12): A-Fraud, BigPapi

Autogamers

1 Ticket Stubs Plus (72 cards, 1:22) Tae Kyun Kim /90
1 Ticket Stubs Plus 2 (63 cards, 1:22) C. Hart /224
1 Autographed Relics (25 cards) T. Tulowitzki /489

The Review

Do you like poorly designed base cards? Gimmicked rookies? Meaningless inserts? Junk hits?

Yes?

Then boy does Topps have a baseball card set for you! 2009 Topps Ticket to Stardom Baseball!

To be fair to Topps, if you're making 17 different baseball card sets in a year, they all can't be winners. Just like last year with Stadium Club, Topps was bound to make a baseball card set that completely sucks; and Ticket to Stardom is just like the product it replaces.

But it's not just the badly designed base set, it's the lack of effort Topps put into it. For example, even though he was released before the start of the season and didn't play an inning in the Majors for any other team the entire 2009 season, Geoff Jenkins is still in the base set at card #36. Oh sure, Topps could have pulled him from the set and replaced him with another player, or a rookie. But that might have required effort.

The base set is 225 cards with the last 25 forming a serial-numbered rookie subset. With last year's Stadium Club, you got one rookie (albeit autographed) in every-other pack making set building plausible, but not likely. Not so with TTS. The stated odds of pulling one of the rookies is 1:45 packs (not even one-per-two-boxes!) and each is numbered to 199. Assuming perfect collation, you would have to open up almost 57 waxboxes to get all 25. With odds like that, why even bother?

But wait, we haven't even mentioned the "hits."

Ticket stubs.

Ummm, really Topps? Ticket stubs, as "relics?"

The Bottom Line

About the only thing good I can say about TTS is that this one waxbox yielded 99% of the short set with no doubles and all the inserts were pulled as promised. My three "hits" are a different story. I got a ticket/jersey of a Korean WBC player, a sticker autograph/jersey of Troy Tulowitzki, and a ticket/double jersey of Milwaukee's Corey Hart.

Product Rating: 1 Gumstick (out of 5)

... and another thing

The Corey Hart ticket/double jersey card I pulled had two swatches of what appears to be the exact same gray road uniform. Doesn't that defeat the whole purpose of a "double jersey" relic card? Shouldn't a "double jersey" relic have, say, a road jersey AND a home jersey? Or a jersey and a bat?