Tigers Checklist: 2009 Goudey

When Goudey was released, it faced a fair bit of criticism from the collecting community over zombie cards and the like. While defenders claimed that these cards accurately payed homage to the rather ugly set that they were based on, I tended to disagree. I'll avoid recapping the entire saga of the day, other than to say this: The Tigers, by and large, were spared of the face-flattening, undead-looking renditions of its players. Thank God.

Base Set The base set is simple: 6 cards, all of them perfectly fine, with only the Granderson bordering on the excellent. There is one short-printed Jack Morris, which is also very nice, except, why so sad, Jack? Hall of Fame balloting got you down?

Two cards from the Sport Royalty subset fill out the regularly numbered cards in the release. One is Al Kaline, the other is a Red Wing. In case you haven't noticed, I include all Detroit-based sports teams when they are released in baseball sets. Sue me.

#69 Curtis Granderson	#70 Carlos Guillen	#71 Gary Sheffield
#72 Miguel Cabrera	#73 Magglio Ordonez	#74 Justin Verlander
#204 Jack Morris SP	#247 Nicklas Lidstrom (Red Wings)	#255 Al Kaline

1935 4-in-1 Inserts As dayf at Cardboard Junkie reminded us recently, these are wonderful little replications of the 1935 Goudey cards, in which the pictures of four players from the 1933 set were shrunk down and placed onto one card. While those cards were mostly team-oriented, the Tigers in this insert set are widely distributed, mostly with position-mates, big boppers and the like. I haven't put in a lot of effort to collecting these, but putting this gallery together has changed my mind. Like the regular cards, these come in Red (Base), Green, Blue and Black (#/21) parallels, but none of them are mini (Can you imagine?).

#35-14 Perry/Morris/ Palmer/Fingers	#35-37 Cabrera/Ordonez/ Granderson/Guillen	#35-60 Chamberlain/Harden/ Lincecum/Verlander
#35-71 Howard/Hamilton/ Pujols/Cabrera	#35-79 Beltran/Lee/ Quentin/Guillen	#35-80 Hafner/Ordonez/ Ramirez/Dye

Relics Pretty simple here. These are the base cards, with a "G" cutout where the jersey swatch goes. I actually like these more than I expected to. I think they may even enhance the base cards, which are pretty plain on their own. I'm not positive about that though. Regardless, all of the swatches are placed so that they don't blatantly impede the subject of the card.

#GM-CA Miguel Cabrera	#GM-CG Carlos Guillen>	#GM-SH Gary Sheffield

Autographs Unfortunately, the Tigers are without the very nice "Goudey Graphs" in this set, but Detroit does manage to score a couple of autographs of the "Sport Royalty" variety. On-card autographs are a huge plus, but I'm not a huge fan of this subset's design or use of photographs as opposed to painting. Still, a Kaline signature enhances all...

#AK Al Kaline	#NL Nicklas Lidstrom (Red Wings)