Leaf does not have ties to other sports at this point, so does not have quite as much to lose as Upper Deck did if they fight it. So this should be interesting to see how it developes. Brian Gray hinted in the thread that there will be an announcement on this in two to three weeks.

Why couldn’t these rumors have come up last weekend when I had Brian Gray on camera?

But now that he is on the DL for a second time, will people be more cautious? Will the demand of the yet to be released products such as Topps Chrome, or Triple Threads wain? Was this all inevitable due to oversaturation of his autograph in one release calendar? We have seen in the past rookies prices drop as more and more autographed cards were released, but at the same time there were more released due to competition in the Baseball card market.

We are in a different world even from a few years ago when Gordon Beckham, or Evan Longoria were the new hot superstars. You can choose what varation of Topps products you want of him, but you don’t have the choice of a SP, SPX, Goudey, Masterpieces or any other card that Upper Deck may have released of him or any current rookie.

It’s a new world collection wise, and the biggest question I am left with is “Will Strasburg being hurt scare away collectors/investors, or does the lack of competition do it more?” Oh yeah, and the bad luck timing award goes to Razor Rookie Rewind, which releases next week and includes the 2010 Bowman Chrome Superfractor of Stephen Strasburg that previously sold for over 20K.

These were preliminary mockups of the design, hence the Tampa Bay listing of team for Inoa.

Everyone,

In light of the recent economic conditions and the market’s temperature at the moment as it relates to higher end items, we at Razor feel as if a product like Distinction Baseball would be badly timed and frankly a little self-indulgent at this point in time. This was set to be the highest end prospect product of all time. While I know many collectors were excited about this product, we cannot in good conscience add a high end product to the lineup given the current state of the hobby and the performance of recent prospect products from all manufacturers.

While we have great disappointment about our decision not to test the price and quality limits of prospect products at this time, we do take great solace in the fact that the exisiting titles featuring the 2008 draft class will be the absolute most desirable Razor cards of those players (no premium patch/autograph cards to outclass or hurt the 2008 launches). We hope this goes some way in assuring our customers that the value of 2008 Signature, 2008 Letterman, and 2008 Metal cards will not be outdone by any future release.

We sincerely believe that this certainty should help stabilize the value collectors find in our 2008 products.
Without the additional use of these players at this time, we are confident the value of our existing products will be enhanced.

Gold parallels of 2008 Metal will go up on eBay this week. In addition, autographed versions will go up for sale over the next 3-4 weeks as cards are returned to us. I am confident that limiting autographs to these three sets is the right decision for both collectors and our company.

Thank you for all the support in 2008 and 2009. As always, we will work hard to provide solid value to our customer. In some cases, that value will only be apparent as more of our players achieve greater success, but we are certain that the long-term value of these 2008 releases will be solid.

Sincerely,
Adam Berk

The next night we recorded episode 23 with Craig Calcaterra of HardBalltimes.com. Craig has written the popular Shyster Ball blog on the HardBall Times site, and we didn’t talk about sports cards as much as we discussed the game of Baseball.

Both episodes were extremely fun to record and I had as much fun talking with them as I have anyone. Check out both of their sites. They are both at the top of the game in the subject matter that they cover.

Discuss the images here at FreedomCardBoard.com. There already is five pages of discussion on this subject.