My First Certified Auto - 2011 Topps Tier One

Although I like to consider my collection fairly complete, the one area that I knew it was lacking was the certified autograph department, as I had exactly zero Rickey's to my name.  It's not that Rickey Henderson has a shortage of certified autographs to choose from, they are just typically fairly expensive, and I'd much rather add a lot of lower end cards for the price of one auto.

But, I did want to add one eventually, and now that I'd personally made a point of not having one, when I finally picked one up, it had to be the right one.  It needed to have a nice design, feature an interesting picture of Rickey on the A's, and be an on-card auto, as opposed to the sticker autos, which don't usually look all that great.  When 2011 Topps Tier One was released last year, I knew that I'd finally found my certified first auto.

The card meets all of my criteria, featuring an original picture of Rickey on the A's (Topps tends to reuse the same image a bit too often), a clean design, and a bold on-card autograph.

This is the base version of the Topps Tier One Top Tier Autographs set, which is #/99.  These have become very popular with set collectors, and the prices have gone up rather significantly from when they were first released.


Although I don't own one, there's also a gold parallel (the smoky/cloudy area behind the picture is gold instead of blue), which is numbered to only 10 copies.

I'm glad the card was able to find a nice home in my collection, but it might be a little lonely, as I'm not sure how many more autos I'll be picking up in the near future.  But, if they keep releasing cards that look like this, it might be sooner rather than later!