A Topps Opening Day Autograph Is One Of My Rarer Matt Kemp Cards.

Ah, Opening Day, that most glorious of baseball days and most inconsequential of baseball sets. I'm not a big set collector, and I enjoy pulling hits of all kinds, so I have less than zero interest in ever buying the product for myself. However, for less than the price of a blaster (and purchased with Card Draft funds, no less), I couldn't possibly let the below beauty go and not add it to my Beast Mode collection. A quick bit of internet research has revealed that these Opening Day Signatures were placed in hobby packs with odds of 1:965. That's right, I would have had to bust roughly 1000 packs to pull any auto, let alone this beauty.

Considering how few of these Opening Day autos I've seen on eBay, COMC, and other avenues such as those, I'd imagine the print run on these is, at most, 25 or so, and perhaps even smaller than that. This was only the third Kemp I had ever come across at the time: two on eBay and one in a forum post I found when searching Google for these 2007 Kemp autos. Three more have sold on eBay since I snagged my copy. It's a tremendous card, from the wonderfully phenomenal red, white, and blue American flag design to the general layout of the card to the simple yet awesome picture of Matty waiting for a pitch to be delivered.

For a product not only not known for autographs, but purchased with the knowledge that it would take a miracle to pull a John Hancock - let alone a big-time player like Matt Kemp, one of if not the best player from the auto set, considering how poor I've heard the checklist for '07 Opening Day was - owning this card is a MAJOR get for me. Generally speaking, I would never want to pay as much as I did for a sticker auto from a product aimed at kids, but I wasn't sure I would ever come across another copy, and certainly not for the great price this one ran me. It's an addition to my Bison PC I'm extremely excited to write-up, and a card I'm immensely happy to own. Kemp autograph number eight is officially in the books.