2014 Panini USA Baseball Cards

I’m from Williamsport, PA. Grew up on Little League Baseball, and attended every single Little League Baseball tournament since I can remember. My grandfather even taking me and my twin brother out of our elementary classroom, as the LLWS started on the first week of school, idiotically enough, in order to go over and catch a game or two. I LOVE international play, especially watching youth. It’s absolutely pure, and nostalgic as all get-out!

I am definitely partial to the spirit of international competition among amateur athletes. (Really wish the Olympics kept baseball, as it is arguably the second most popular sport in the world.)

This product, I love. I like the clean, simple design showing off national pride. The only downfall, is that I would like this to no longer be focused solely on Team USA. It would be great to have a product which features all the teams. I get that American players are going to tend to be the ones most likely to stand out in the future for all those prospectors out there. But it would be great to see the players who go nowhere from other countries, so we can get a sense of the teams that played during these tournaments. That, and I would also love to get a chance to collect flags from other countries and build team sets of these. Plus, it avoids the glaringly obvious lack of team logos. Not that the lack of team logos necessarily bothers me personally.

Finally, all of these subsets are completely unnecessary. This is a product that could be done old-school 80s-style with one large base set of all the players from all the teams. Maybe have one subset of autographs, and maybe one other for memorabilia cards as inserts in order to keep the pack busting interesting, and to attract prospectors. There are also too many parallels. Two max should be fine, as inserts, also to keep things somewhat interesting.

I would probably rate this product as somewhat less than 4 stars, as this could be so much more than it is as I imagine what it should be.