2012 Panini Golden Age box break

I ordered just one of these boxes; in hindsight, I enjoyed opening these enough that I could have justified 2 boxes.  Instead I’m buying some of the inserts and other cards on eBay, so that’s cool.  As with most of the retro sets I’ve opened, I like a lot of things about this set.  The base cards aren’t based off of any particular set, but they do have a nice design and a tobacco era feel.  The inserts are pretty cool. Though I wish you got a couple more per box, I’d rather just have 5 inserts and 2 hits than 4x that many and water it down.  It’s kind of cool getting an insert and thinking it is a tough pull!

My idea / suggestion for this product – the Golden Age idea is certainly painted with a broad brush.  There are athletes from as early as the 1890’s, and as late as the 1970’s.  This is the first year Panini has done this, and I understand the business idea behind this, but wouldn’t parceling this out over a few years be really neat?  For example, if the first year of Panini Golden Age had a them from the “tobacco era” for baseball cards – 1890 through 1920 or so.  Then in year 2, you did the 1920’s and 1930’s.  Then, follow that up with the 1940’s and 1950’s, and you could wrap it up with the 60’s and 70’s.  That would be a cool way to do it, and I’d certainly be in for that!

Still, for a set where Panini doesn’t have license, I can’t complain.  This box was less than 70 bucks delivered, and I had a fun time opening it up.

First up – here’s the box topper.  These are the Ferguson Bakery pennants.  They fit perfectly into the 4-card Ultra Pro pages, so that’s good.  There are yellow and blue versions (no rarer than the other) and you also could have pulled a 5 x 7 movie poster card.  I’m going to try to collect these, so I’m glad I got a pennant instead of the movie.  In person, these are really cool – the pennants are made with felt and the picture is embedded in a neat way.

Here’s 20 of the 24 the mini parallels I got, so you can get a feel for what the set looks like.  I’ll do a post tomorrow showing off some of the base cards.

Here are the different card backs you can get, which are modeled after the card backs from a few different tobacco-era sets.

There is one insert that doesn’t have any basis in previous baseball sets.  Headlines is a newspaper-themed set that covers some of the bigger news moments from the era covered by the Golden Age product.

The 2 other inserts you can get are based on the 1934-36 Play Ball set and the 1907 Newark Evening News.  I got Brooks Robinson and Hayne Mansfield in the Play Ball set, plus Joe Garagiola for the Newark Evening insert.

Finally, here’s the hits.  The relic set is the Museum Relic set – I got something from the great Charlie Chaplin.  These are interesting, not sure if I’ll be keeping this one or not.

My autograph was one I will be keeping – Ron Turcotte, the jockey who rode Secretariat to horse racing history.

Below are the “stats” for the box.

24 packs per box * 6 cards per pack + 1 box topper +1 extra card = 146 cards

112 of the 146 card base set (76.7% set completion)

2 doubles

1 Ferguson Bakery Pennants Yellow (B. Dickey)

18 Minis, Broad Leaf Brown

3 Minis, Croft’s Candy Red

1 Mini, Broad Leaf Blue

1 Mini, Croft’s Candy Blue

1 Mini, Ty Cobb King of Tobacco

2 Headlines

2 Batter Up

1 Newark Evening World Supplements

1 Historic Signatures (R. Turcotte)

1 Museum Age Memorabilia (C. Chaplin)