Finest Tsunami

I have not done a lot with opening Topps Finest boxes the last few years, but I have still enjoyed picking up a few of the single cards here and there.  After all of these years its still a very nice product and one of those that appears year and year out.  

This year I was a little bit torn about picking up cards from this product.  Earlier this spring Topps announced that it was going to skip over local card shops and just sell Finest directly to customers in their online store.  I know a lot of card shops on social media voiced concerns about the decision by Topps.  The general concern is that Topps will continue to do this with other card products and cut out the card shops altogether.  

That would be horrendous for the hobby.  

I am not even sure when Finest was released, but I decided long ago to completely avoid the boxes being sold by Topps in their store.  So, late last week I dipped my toe into the water and picked up a Finest autograph from one of my favorite Cardinals pitchers: Carlos Martinez.  

Here is the card:

Finest is one of those products that has 15 different parallels with all sorts of different colors and serial numbers, but with Finest I just keep it simple and find the green cards.  I know that there are rarer and shinier Carlos Martinez autographs in this set.  With the Martinez card I really like the red accents on top of the green card.  The red on Martinez's glove and uniform really pop on this card.  Easily my favorite Finest autograph since I picked up this Shelby Miller a few years back.