If you’ve got the buck, 2002 SP Authentic has the bang. Loaded with short-printed rookies, autographs and jersey cards, this stuff is a crap shoot if I ever did see one, but if a couple of the rookies pan out down the line, SPA should show some of their more desirable cards.
The 90-card base set might be a forgotten afterthought, but I look at it as gravy. The design is clean, with lots of white space, a clear font and just enough foil. The card backs have only one season of stats, but include decent bios. But really, people don’t generally spend this kind of money to build the base set. They want the limited rookies, autographs and such.
My box yielded two basic Future Watch cards numbered out of 1999 and one Tier One autographed Future Watch card /999. I also scored with a SP Authentic Limited autographed Future Watch parallel of which only 125 exist.
Due to some sort of licensing agreement, the Future USA Watch cards are numbered as an insert set, but are identical in design to the base Future Watch cards and are numbered out of 1999 as well. I got two. While they won’t be considered true rookies by most, these Team USA cards should hold their value for quite some time and may find their way into set builders who go after all the SPs and such.
As for other insert sets, the Gold Limited cards are your basic parallel limited to 50. The game jerseys, inserted one per box, have a good sized swatch embedded within an SP insignia. The popular Chirography autographs return, this time serial numbered.
Without much in the way of odds to go by, from the looks of things I had a decent box. Besides the oodles of rookies and rookie parallels, I managed to complete the 90-card basic short set with 20 doubles left over. Because the checklist is so limited, the checklist is made of exclusively of A-listers. In total I got three autographs, the best of which was a Chirography Jason Giambi 096/244. I also got an Andruw Jones jersey.
SP Authentic is for the collector who likes a bit of a gamble. Although I did get my fair share of rookies, it’s still going to be a while before I find out whether this gamble was worth it or not.
2002 SP Authentic Baseball Box Breakdown:
Packs per box: 24
Cards per pack: 5
Total cards: 119
Cards in base set: 90
SPs: 80
Base set singles: 90
Future Watch (#/1999): 2 (93. Chris Baker, 123. Elio Serrano)
Signed Future Watch Tier 1 (#/999): 1 (154. Mark Corey)
Signed Future Watch Tier 2 (#/249): 0
Doubles: 20
Triples+: 0
Inserts: 6
- Authentic Excellence (/25): 0
- Future USA Watch (/1999): 2 (19. Shane Costa, 21. Sam Fuld)
- SP Big Mac Missing Link (/25): 0
- SP Signed Big Mac (149 available): 0
- SP Authentic Limited (/125): 1 (164. Cam Esslinger – Autographed)
- SP Authentic Limited Gold (/50): 1 (114. Earl Snyder)
- SP Chirography: 1 (JG. Jason Giambi (096/244))
- SP Chirography Gold (/30): 0
- SP Game Jerseys (1:24): 1 (J-AJ. Andruw Jones)
- SP Game Jerseys Gold (/30): 0
- SP Authentic Prospect Signatures (1:36): 0
- Signs of Greatness (/1): 0
