Something old, something new, something orange, and something, um, black?
Part of the Donruss legacy from the Playoff years was innovation and diversity in memorabilia. To date though, Panini has been a bit inconsistent in its memorabilia releases. This fall, Panini brought the Immaculate Collection brand to baseball and brought with it some of what made Playoff/Donruss great. It also brought some of what has become controversial in the hobby and, until now, has been largely unseen in baseball products.
Base Cards
As with most premium products, there isn’t much of a base set here. Three Mets are featured in the 100-card base set: David Wright, Matt Harvey, and Zack Wheeler. Base versions are numbered to 99, parallels are numbered to 10, 5, and 1.
Rookie Autographs Material
If you were wondering where the Rookies are, they are featured in an autographed memorabilia set numbered sequentially following the base set. These are Matt den Dekker’s first MLB memorabilia cards and Juan Centeno’s first, um, well we’ll get to that. Each card also has a Prime parallel featuring a patch or piping swatch. Interestingly, the base versions are numbered to 49 while the Prime versions are numbered to 99. It sure seems like they got a whole lot of good pieces for some of these guys somehow…
Immaculate Swatches
With every card in Immaculate Collection numbered to 99 or less, there are bound to be a lot of filler cards numbered to 99 to offset the bigger (and far more limited) hits. That’s where the Immaculate Swatches insert set comes in, a set of 95 basic memorabilia cards with most numbered to 99. Each card also has a Prime parallel (numbered to 99 or less) with a swatch of patch or piping and a Premium parallel (numbered to 20 or less) with a swatch of tag or button. Each card has a layer of acetate on the top and bottom, eliminating for the most part the chipping problems that affect some of the other cards in this product. Of course, acetate has its own problems with scratches.
Nine Mets are featured here, starting with active stars David Wright and Matt Harvey. Wright’s swatches are a mix of his orange Los Mets jersey and a gray road jersey, while Harvey’s is from the 1993 throwback jersey that we’ve seen in other Panini products this year.
Four Mets Rookies are also featured here. Centeno and den Dekker are back along with Travis d’Arnaud and Wilmer Flores. d’Arnaud’s swatches are from a blue jersey (with orange piping), but Flores and Centeno have swatches from a black jersey. Wait a second, a black jersey? The Mets haven’t worn black since 2012, the year before these players made their MLB debuts. What gives?
Ah, that explains it. For Centeno, Flores, and d’Arnaud, all of the material in Immaculate Collection (and subsequent Panini products) is event-worn, not game-worn. What’s the difference? Well, game-worn memorabilia was worn on the field in an official regular season, postseason, spring training, exhibition, All-Star, or other MLB game or game-type activity. Or in the dugout. Or in the bullpen. Or in the pre-game ceremony. Or really anywhere in close proximity to some sort of MLB activity. Anything that doesn’t meet these vague criteria is either event-worn or player-worn and, unless the event is specified (which it isn’t here), there’s really no difference between the two. The material has no more significance than a random t-shirt.
This isn’t the first time we’ve seen event-worn material in a baseball product. Back in 2001, Upper Deck used material worn during a photo shoot for cards of that year’s draft picks. At least Upper Deck gave some indication of where the material came from though.
Back to game-worn material, there are a few familiar names from years past shown as Mets as well. Like the Playoff/Donruss products, Immaculate Collection matches the team that the material came from with the team that the player is shown with. While that means no Mets memorabilia cards for Mike Piazza or Nolan Ryan, it also means that we get Darryl Strawberry, Tom Glavine, and Carlos Beltran in the Mets checklist. Glavine’s material is from the infamous orange batting practice jersey introduced in 2003. This is the first time we’ve seen orange material for Glavine and the first time one of these batting practice jerseys has been used in cards in a decade.
Accolades
The Mets memorabilia in Immaculate Collection doesn’t just go back to the ’80s. Two of the team’s most fondly remembered managers are featured in the Accolades memorabilia set. Casey Stengel’s pinstripe Mets jersey, first seen in 2001 Leaf products, must be just about gone. Only six swatches are used here, five pinstripe swatches in the base version and one patch in the Prime parallel. Gil Hodges has orange jacket swatches and multicolor jacket cuff swatches in the Prime parallel. With these additions, Immaculate Collection has representation from the birth of the Mets all the way to the final game of 2014.
Immaculate Single, Dual, Triple, and Quad
Smaller memorabilia swatches mean more variety, which is where the Immaculate Singles and their corresponding multi-swatch cards come in. Tom Seaver, Travis d’Arnaud, and Wilmer Flores are featured in the single player version, each with base and Prime variants. Zack Wheeler is featured with Tyler Skaggs in the Dual Player version and Carlos Beltran has pieces of bat alongside David Ortiz and Albert Pujols in the Trios version, each with a Prime parallel.
Jose Reyes is the only Met with multiple swatches on one card. His Immaculate Quads card features swatches from pinstripe and black jerseys plus pieces of bat.
Premium Material
Immaculate Collection also delivers jumbo swatches from some of the same players we’ve already seen – pinstriped Matt Harvey swatches, orange David Wright swatches, and blue (event-worn) swatches from Travis d’Arnaud and Wilmer Flores. Each has a Prime version numbered to 10.
Hitters and Pitchers
But wait, there’s more! The Immaculate Hitters and Immaculate Pitchers sets add slightly smaller jumbo swatches from Wright again plus Dillon Gee and Johan Santana, giving us one more former Met. As always, there’s a Prime version numbered to 25 or less.
Autographs
Rounding out the checklist is an assortment of on-card autographs from seven different players across seven different insert sets. The big names here are Mike Piazza and Nolan Ryan, who have their only Mets cards in the Immaculate Heroes Autographs and The Greatest Signatures sets, respectively. Most of these are numbered to 25 or less, except for the players shown above.
And on top of that, some of them feature acetate outer layers with autographs in gold ink on an inner layer. It’s a nice look and adds some variety to the autographs.
Everything Else
There are still a few more surprises in Immaculate Collection, but they were a bit outside my budget. At a suggested price of $150 per 6-card box, you would expect a few big hits. You just won’t find any of them on the Mets checklist. Even the Stengel 1-of-1 patch card mentioned earlier failed to reach the $150 mark. Other notable tough pulls are the Johan Santana and Matt Harvey Immaculate Jumbos (numbered to 3 and 2, respectively), the Tom Glavine and Travis d’Arnaud Nameplate Notability letter patches (numbered to 7 for each), and the Tom Seaver The Greatest Materials (numbered to 10).
The Verdict
I’m not really sure what to make of Immaculate Collection as a whole. On the one hand, the names on the checklist cover 50+ years of Mets history with Hall of Famers, players who should be Hall of Famers, stars from every decade, and plenty of Rookies and young stars. On the other hand, most of the material from those Rookies is event-worn, starting a trend that could undermine what little value memorabilia still has. Chipping is also an issue for non-acetate cards, while scratches are always an issue for acetate. Add in the lack of team names and logos due to the shortsightedness of MLB Properties and you have a product that is great in theory but lacks in execution. Unlike Immaculate Collection in other sports, you won’t find many $500+ cards in the baseball version. At a price of $150 per pack and with most common cards selling for less than $15, there’s not much value here. That’s great news if you buy singles on the secondary market, but it’s not a recipe for long-term success. Panini needs to kick things up a notch if it wants to truly honor the legacy it inherited from Playoff/Donruss.
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