First Class

With the 2012 season winding down, we continue looking ahead to 2013. On top of having a triple crown winner, 3 perfect games thrown and 4 other no-hitters, 2012 will probably be remembered for one of the best class of rookies. We all know Mike Trout had an MVP-caliber season and Bryce Harper took some of the steps to justify all the hype. But moving even further down, there were lots of guys that put up good-to-great rookie campaigns. So how about an insert to commemorate this class?

The design is horizontal with the most prominent feature probably being the box on the right with a big 1 cut out to display a relic. Just to add some variety, the position players have bat swatches while the pitchers have jersey swatches. The rest of the design is bathed in team colors with the player cutout overlapping a colored wood background. The 'FIRST CLASS' text has a 1 hiding in 'first' to really play up the number aspect of the design. There's also some silver foil to add a bit of flash.

Onto the backside where we have team colors filling the majority of space with plenty of room for a summary of each player's rookie season. On the right side, we have another 1 cut out but this time housing another action shot. To the left we have the team logo along with the authenticity statement for each relic. It's less vague than what you see on Topps relic cards these days and there's even a unique code for each card that you could enter to find out specifically when each memorabilia relic was used in-game.

Along with these 3 here and Trout and Harper that were mentioned above, this set would have guys like Todd Frazier, Jesus Montero, pretty much any of the A's starting pitchers, Will Middlebrooks, Yu Darvish, Anthony Rizzo and more.