Cards I Have Known

You've caught me in a lyrical mood tonight. Maybe it's the chilled autumn air of my walk home from work tonight. Or maybe it's that we're finally able to tuck away our political differences and focus on the season of giving.

And as far as giving is concerned, I've decided to give myself more time to write. About what, you ask? Why, those cardboard rectangles that so dominate my life. Yes, many years have passed since we thrived here together, but lo, the cardboard sea calls to me still.

I saw a friend yesterday and he expressed interest in putting together a vintage set from childhood. Of course, he's not alone in this idea—like clockwork, you hit a certain age and find yourself on eBay, buying boxes of 1987 Fleer, or 1991 Topps Stadium Club, or whatever your Holy Grail set was when you were 8 years old.

The conversation got me thinking... Is that all there is? Endless pining over the card or set that got away? The one we couldn't afford on a $4-a-week allowance? Maybe so. But I've known and loved a lot of sets over the years, and, like some of you, never threw away my cards or had a parent who did. I've bought and sold sets, given away thousands upon thousands of cards to strangers and friends, and made lopsided trades just to empty my collection down to the barest of bones. (And I've documented most of it, over the years, on this blog.) So for me, the existential hole that only owning Will Clark's rookie card might fill is not so very big. In fact, it may not be there at all. But to my friend, that hole is very real, and a couple Will Clark and Bo Jackson rookies would help fill it in quite nicely, thank you very much.

We talked about which set to collect. For him, it's the greatest hobby hits of the 1980s: 1983 Topps, 1984 Donruss, 1987 Fleer. For me, it was a bit more complicated: 1977 Topps, plus the cloth cards, the regional Burger King Yankees set and any additional O-Pee-Chee cards featuring players in different unis, photos, or teams. And I'd probably create my own customs once it was all said and done.

Talking out loud about collecting a new set got me excited, but it also got me thinking about what sort of collector I really am. My friend was excited by the idea of buying packs until he had completed a set that had eluded him as a kid. I was going on a more complicated, multi-step track: buying individual packs would probably be too cost-prohibitive. My route to a complete mini-mega-master set was going to be a series of eBay wins, Sportlots.com bulk purchases, and possibly a few cards picked up at a show or through my trading group.

I'm staring at that last sentence. Maybe to rekindle my love of collecting is just completing a set I can still buy in packs, or boxes. There are so few sets I'd want to collect from my childhood that I don't already have. I can count them on one hand: 1989 Topps, 1989 Score, 1985 Topps, 1994 Fleer. This friend and I have done Junk Wax Battles in the past, and those were a lot of fun. Maybe what I need is a true junk wax set... 1991 Fleer? The ugliest banana-yellow cards you've ever seen? Or all 10,000 cards from 1991 Score? If I'm going to do a junk wax set, it's got to have subsets, so that rules out 1990 Upper Deck and 1991 Fleer, despite the Pro Visions. Maybe 1990 Topps? I hated those cards as a kid, but 9 Nolan Ryans and a Greg Vaughn Future Stars card can't be wrong (plus all those recent Archives cards!)...

Cards Without Borders: 2016 Topps

Two thousand sixteen finds Topps in a familiar position: once again playing the revolutionary card and the catch-up card. No white borders. Heck, no borders on the front—just a half-hidden team logo design reminiscent of the 2006 MLB The Show cover art.

This is the first design for the flagship Topps set (not their other brands) in the company's 65-year history that doesn't feature some kind of border. Think about that for a minute. The design malaise of the white-bordered years (2008–2014) seems like a distant memory. Even last year's casual homage to the 25th anniversary of 1990 Topps seems quaint. Borders? That's so 2015!

Full-bleed photography is old hat for a lot of card brands, most notably Topps's own Stadium Club imprint (the brand debuted in 1991 with a bright, shiny, never-done-before design feature: full-bleed Kodak photography). But Stadium Club has always been seen as more of a premium than the eponymous brand. 

Obviously, it's a dramatic shift for Topps. But it's also a natural next step, as the company had to find a way to marry the designs of its base tactile and digital products (Topps Bunt). It could make more Bunt designs look like traditional baseball cards. Or it could make its baseball cards look more like video game cover art. They went with the latter. 

And you know what? There's absolutely nothing wrong with that decision. Though the photography looks heavily processed, the cards are attractive. Incorporating the stock-in-trade faux watercolor look Topps has long employed in its Allen & Ginter designs doesn't hurt, either. The glossy stock doesn't feel cheap, and the photos are a nice mix of in-game action shots and paused-action close-ups.

Even some of the inserts breathe with their own life: besides the trip-down-memory-lane retread (Berger's Best), the Stadium Club–esque "Perspectives" and position players as pitchers (Pressed Into Service) are fun ideas. The celebrities insert isn't bad (First Pitch), and the Cubs insert is okay, even though its subjects skew more toward the present-day roster than I would have liked (100 Years of Wrigley Field). These are all insert sets I would collect, though the Wrigley Field set gets me thinking: Why didn't they do something like this for Fenway Park's 100th anniversary in 2012? The only insert set that had me yawning was the one-two lineup punch of "Back 2 Back." The world doesn't need any more insert cards celebrating Ryan Braun. 

And don't get me started about parallels. On the whole, I think they're a waste of time, especially if they don't add anything to the design. In the packs I opened, I got a few rainbow foil parallels (not serial-numbered), a few "gold" parallels (numbered out of 2016), and an acetate "clear" parallel of Mark Melancon (numbered out of 10). The clear acetate parallel is a fun idea, and reminds me of a throwback from the mid-1990s. The other parallels, however, are not fun and remind me only that it would've been nice to receive a different card in my pack. I especially don't understand the logic of non-serial-numbered parallels. I think it would be much more enticing if the rainbow-foil cards were numbered out of 1,000,000 or whatever their print run happened to be. (Of course, the next logical step in this serial-numbering madness is for every single card to be serial-numbered. Oh, how I long for a Jered Weaver numbered 1,110,054 / 200,650,755! Every single stinkin' card would be unique...)

By elevating the look and feel of the base cards of the flagship set, Topps has done something that all 21st-century companies try to achieve: they've unified their brands. This is different from past years where all that separated Opening Day, flagship, and Topps Chrome was a logo and card stock. Base digital and tactile offerings look and feel similar, and low-end and higher-end tactile offerings incorporate similar, if not the same, design characteristics. For Topps, there's the hope that this diminishes attrition; not just losing customers to other card manufacturers, but to the company's real competition: video games, smartphones, and whatever else steals the attention and dollars of collectors.

Heavily Photoshopped cards without borders is just the beginning. Maybe the next step for the company will be an augmented reality app where you use the backgrounds of tactile cards to find "hidden" virtual packs of Topps Bunt cards in the real world. And so it may seem like a small thing, but I bet you that we won't see the return of a white—or any other color, tint, or hue—border anytime soon. 

Fuzzy for the Wrong Reasons

Notice that Panini used a piece of Scotch tape
to keep the card in the top loader. Not cool.

I'm new to this whole "redemption" game. Actually, that's not true. I've mailed away for cards in the past, it's just that the last time I did it was 1994 and I received the 1993-94 Upper Deck NBA Lottery Picks set in return. Never have I waited for an autographed card from a manufacturer. (Actually, that's not true, either. Back when I was doing TTM autographs, I sent a 1987 Topps checklist to Topps CEO Arthur Shorin to sign at Topps HQ. And he did. And I got it back and then promptly lost it in a stack of commons...) What I'm getting at here is that I had no idea what to expect from Panini after submitting a code on their website last fall for an autographed Chandler Parsons Past & Present draft pick card.

I went in with zero expectations. For one thing, I was surprised that Panini even accepted the code I inputted, if simply because the set came out in 2012 and I had missed the redemption deadline by at least a few months, if not a few years. I know how important the redemption game is to manufacturers: it's another way to differentiate from the competition. Saying that, I expected a "Sorry, you're too late" message. I guess though that if your redemptions are "always on," so to speak, your customers will take notice. And while I profess a certain level of innocence, I'm no slouch. I've read blogs and articles about waiting for redemption cards, and the trials and tribulations of receiving the wrong cards, or poorly signed cards, or whatever.

Which leads me to the card I received a few days ago. It's signed by someone whose first names starts with a "C," that much is for certain. I can even make our a "25," and Parsons is shown in his #25 Rockets uniform, so I would suppose that the signature is that of the card's subject, Chandler Parsons. But the signature looks like it went through the wash, or was signed in a sauna. It's blurred on the edges, which is too bad. I mean, I did send away for the card after the purported redemption period had ended, and it would stand to reason that most, if not all of the signed cards for this promotion had been redeemed already, so all that was left was the dregs, the sloppies, and the cards signed with a pen about to run out of ink.

So I can't really complain. Besides, it got me thinking: What if manufacturers paid MLB, or the NBA, or NFL, or whichever league, to have its players sign cards during a game? It could be during halftime, or while their team is at bat. Since every game is televised, showing players busily signing sports cards would be whimsical cutaways for broadcasters. "Well, Bob, there's Kevin Durant, Russell Westbrook, and their Thunder teammates signing cards for Panini's 2016-17 NBA Hoops," or "It looks like Clayton Kershaw has found a way to stay loose between starts, Joe: He's down in the dugout signing cards for 2016 Topps baseball cards!... That's right, Harold. Fans, look for autographed cards of your favorite stars randomly inserted into packs of 2016 Topps Baseball..." If teams can sell out their coaches and managers for telecast interviews during a game, there's no reason players' downtime should be off-limits.

Much like my plan for turning broken bats into game-used memorabilia cards, complete with game date–stamping, I expect this idea will also be ignored. But what makes these ideas unique is that they solve the problem of poor quality: there would already be so much documentation of the materials that went into making the cards that the quality of the bat shaving itself—or in this case, signature—would be of less importance than the act of its creation. As I understand it, the actual "game-used memorabilia" that go into relic cards are rarely, if ever, actually used in a live game. Similarly, autographed cards are signed in marathon sessions done in the off-season by players sitting at a conference table with bottles of water nearby. These things, which should be overflowing with the implied "love of the game," are in fact created in sterile environments with sterile materials by men who are late for their tee times.

What I'm saying is, it all could be so much more. That Chandler Parsons autograph should be fuzzy—not because the pen was running out of ink or the Panini intern set his bottle of water down on it, but because a sweaty Parsons should've signed it in the Rockets' locker room during halftime of a nationally televised game. You want us to be excited about your products? Make your cards mean something.

Snowbound and Stir Crazy

In case you missed it, Boston has received so much snow in the last few weeks that everything and everyone—including me—is at a breaking point. The MBTA doesn't work, the government is encouraging people to stay indoors and off the roads, and there are no signs that the cold and the snow will let up anytime soon. Which has given me plenty of time to stew in my thoughts...

I would really like to see colleges offer an intercollegiate stock car racing circuit, if only to see cars and fire suits covered in logos and emblems of universities and names of individual departments. Maybe the Dale Earnhardt Jr. Chair in Automotive Engineering?

I haven't bought any 2015 Topps Series One yet, but I'm digging the acetate parallel. It reminds me of the Slideshow insert set from 1995 Leaf. An idea's an automatic winner in my book if you need a functioning lightbox in order to enjoy the cards.

And while we're on Series One, the sheer volume of opened cards listed on eBay right now is staggering. Massive lots of hand-collated sets, "unsearched" (yeah right) lots of base cards, parallels, inserts, autographed cards, game-used swatches, and more. Didn't it just release a few weeks ago? It gets me thinking about collecting in Bachelor terms—here for "the right reasons" versus the wrong reasons. While all this stuff on eBay is great for cheapskate collectors like me who just want to see the cards, it's also off-putting. Why would someone buy so many cards in the first place if they're just going to try to flip them for pennies on the dollar? Is it really all about finding the case hits?

I finally put my 1969 Topps set in pages. Got me thinking, did Ultra Pro decrease the quality of its nine-pocket pages? The ones I bought seem flimsy.

Also put my Heritage High Numbers set in pages (with the rest of the Heritage set). Looks good. Wish I had disposable income enough to assemble Heritage every year.

Scott Crawford on Cards has a great idea about collecting over the course of a year: only focus on certain sets and interests during certain months. That way your individual collections each receive attention and your interest doesn't flag. For me, it would be

Jan/July: 1970s Topps basketball
Feb/Aug: Adding new players to my Red Soxlopedia
March/Sept: 2014 Topps Heritage Minis
April/Oct: 1969 Topps variations
May/Nov: Mega master set additions for 1978, 1986, and 1987
June/Dec: 2015 Topps Archives (only cards of players depicted in the 1976 style, and only those players who also had a card in the original 1976 set)

The much-discussed decline of blogging in the sports-card-collecting hobby is sad to me. There are literally scores of YouTube users who post box breaks but don't seem all that interested in the cards they find—unless those cards are serially numbered or autographed—or have anything to say about the cards. Blogging about cards allows for more than just posting images of the cards. It allows you to say what you like about the cards, about why you collect. It's important that this outlet doesn't disappear.

Lastly, with all these stamped buybacks, Topps has finally released the Archives: Commons set I predicted back in 2007.

5 Things I Want to See in 2015

As we wrap up 2014, instead of reflecting on this year's hobby highlights, I'm looking ahead to what I want to see in 2015.

1. More old brands resurrected from the mid-1990s junk wax heap. Did you collect Upper Deck's Fleer Retro basketball set? Or what about Topps Archives baseball or football? Or Pinnacle baseball? As long as the hobby's hurtling down mid-1990s memory lane, let's go all out. I've already advocated for a throwback Studio set (complete with mullet wigs). But what about 1992's Topps Kids? It could work as a short standalone set, large insert set for a set like Topps Opening Day, or part of a tongue-in-cheek Topps Archives offering.

2. No more relic cards. Dear Card Companies, Nobody cares about these. Relic cards don't hold value. Stop including them in your products. Or if that's too radical, make relic cards better. What about stamping them with the game date when they were used? Or better yet, make them memorable. Nobody in their right mind should be excited about receiving a tiny square of David Freese's away jersey. But what if you compressed a jersey or autographed t-shirt into the size of a jumbo pack? I will definitely be excited about pulling an autographed David Freese Angels t-shirt out of my blaster box from Target.

3. Fewer parallels. Do collectors really want endless parallels of the same card? Red, green, blue, camo, pink, black, printing plates, red backs, green backs—the list goes on and on. I'm convinced that if we continue down this path, there will be more serial-numbered cards manufactured than non-serial-numbered cards. Yes, there may be less of each produced, but so what? There are so many different sets produced each year, each with their own parallels, that there aren't enough collectors in the world for these cards to retain their "value." This is already a slippery slope. Let's not slide all the way into the abyss.

4. A food set. I'd like to see the MLBPA, NBAPA, NFLPA, NHLPA, or heck, even MLS strike a deal with a consumer goods company to put cards on food products like cereal, granola bars, yogurt-cup six-packs, whatever. It would be good for sports, and good for collecting. I don't expect a gigantic 200-card set like the old Post Cereal baseball sets from the early 1960s, but a 40 to 60–card set would do the trick. I know I'm not alone in wanting to see this.

5. More videos from the card manufacturers—and not of box breaks. Topps, if you're reading this, you should create a series of videos of no more than five minutes in length, each showcasing a milestone in the company's history (like the revolutionary printing process that created Topps Finest in 1993), but without compromising the company's trade secrets. Have you ever read the story of how the Apple designers created the prototype iPod? I've read it many times, and it never gets boring. The same would be true of how the wizards at Topps created Topps Finest.

How To Save The Base Set

How long has the flagship Topps base set been dead? Since 1996? Maybe not that long, but it sure has felt like that. Instead of a checklist interspersed with All-Stars, team cards, and subsets, almost a generation of flagship base set checklists have been divided as follows: one or two series, each made up of 300 to 400 base cards of individual players, followed by a string of team cards, then designated rookie cards, then perhaps, if you're good, between five and ten "fun cards," that aren't all that fun, just action shots with different headlines. Fun subsets like Turn Back The Clock, All Stars, Record Breakers, Season Highlights, World Series, and even Father/Son are long gone. 

Instead, the base set checklist is overrun with short (or single) prints, and recently, super-short prints. Sure, finding an SP or SSP in a pack is fun, I'm not going to deny that. But when companies don't want to expand the base set checklist (thus SPs, variations, and SSPs hiding behind regular base card checklist numbers), the idea of adding a subset or two (or three or four) would mean removing a handful of rookie-card slots or end-of-the-bench players who might turn out to be diamonds in the rough.

Here's a solution. First off, don't touch the SSP idea; it's a draw for too many collectors. But instead of hidden base-checklist SPs, add subset cards as base-checklist variations. And don't short-print them, either—seed them 1:1 or 1:2, in a different pack position than inserts or SPs are traditionally placed. Packs will become livelier thanks to these accessible SPs. Although SPs in name only, the subsets would still be hidden off the regular base-set checklist. This way, the checklist holds steady at 600 or 700 cards, with a "master" base set checklist of 650 to 800 cards completely accessible to collectors not interested in spending lots of cash for expensive short prints. 

Of course, this idea may not work for all sets. A set I'm looking forward to is Heritage '65, due Spring 2014. Unless an asteroid hits Topps HQ in Lower Manhattan in the next few months, my educated guess is that the checklist will have at least 75 on-checklist SPs, with chrome and refractor parallel sets, plus the tired Heritage stable of inserts News Highlights, Highlights, Then & Now, and New Age Performers. It's incredible to me that these insert sets keep chugging along, despite wearing out their welcome years ago, but that's a topic for another day. Let's just focus on the base checklist. 

What if Topps shook things up? Like by removing most if not all of the base-checklist SPs. For clarification, I'm not talking about hidden variations. If anything, by unlocking these 75 or so numbers from short-print status, it opens the possibility of adding meaningful shadow SPs. 

Take the original checklist from 1965 Topps, for example. It's chock full of retiring legends, Hall of Fame rookie cards, and exciting stars. To revitalize the Heritage checklist, take a page from the All-Time Fan Favorites sets and create shadow SPs of players like Yogi Berra, Warren Spahn, Sandy Koufax, Mickey Mantle, Whitey Ford, Hank Aaron, Bob Gibson, Steve Carlton, and others on their original checklist numbers but using different photos than their original cards. 

This will allow collectors to be able to complete the regular set without breaking the bank, but also add a twist for master set collectors. And this is just the thing a set like Heritage needs—heck, like any set these days needs: a revitalization of the base-set checklist from the inside out. 

The Case for Box Collectors

Every so often you hear of a collector buying up an old empty display box from the Fifties or Sixties. They're not the subject of this post.

I'm writing about the fact that so many collectors purchase a full box of packs, instead of individual packs. The practice has become so common that card manufacturers now cater to the box collector.

And not just with the upper-tier consumer, either. Thus the presence (and desirability) of box loaders. And as an aside, are box loaders the modern-day equivalent to cards that used to be found on box bottoms? I think they are...

Thus the common parlance of referring to the odds of receiving a specific card based on times-per-case, not times-per-box. We are surprised when a box contains an unexpectedly large (or small) amount of chase cards. We've come to expect excellent collation, and are thrown for a loop when we rack up doubles and triples, just from 24 packs.

Purchasing cards by the box is such a regular occurrence that manufacturers have taken to selling cards at retail stores (themselves big boxes) in mini boxes, with mini packs stacked inside like nesting dolls. It's half the amount of cards, at half the price, like the manufacturers are training young collectors for when they can afford the big boy boxes.

It's an interesting situation that's evolved over the years. I'd never really noticed it until I started working next door to a Kmart and would browse the store on my lunch break. The mini box seems so perfect a vehicle for training young collectors to buy in bulk (especially those boxes that come replete with guaranteed jersey card), and I'm sure they make nice gifts.

But what does it say about where the hobby is going? Does it effectively spell the death of the pack? Or was the pack already on a path to a slow demise before the box boom? Also, what does it say about the future marketing of the case?

The box is as important to the hobby today as the pack was twenty years ago. So if we skip ahead even five years, it makes sense that we'll start seeing case loader insert sets or some other incentive for collectors to purchase a case. Also, if the case is the thing of the future, what does that say about the place of the card shop or dealer?

How to Make Relics Mean Something Again

Here's a funny thing to consider: the term "relic" means something from a bygone era, or of historical interest. Only recently has it taken on the connotations of game-used memorabilia. And only really recently has the term come to mean both: cards with game-used jersey swatches and bat shavings are in such proliferation that the idea no longer seems fresh.

So how do we remedy the situation? There's the argument that companies create less of these cards, but telling someone interested in making a profit to create less of something rings too naive. Instead, what if companies begin Game-Date Stamping?

A year ago I was all up in arms because Topps rammed the Generation NOW insert set down the hobby's throat. But there was an interesting idea at the root of those cards: the celebration of an individual achievement. The problem was that it was replicated ad nauseam. But what if companies married the two––relic cards and Generation NOW--together?

I read yesterday that Major League Baseball is asking teams to collect all the bats that break over the course of this season. Card companies should buy up those broken bats, keep records of those games in which they broke, and then serial-stamp the date of the game onto cards containing a shaving of the broken bat.

Let me put it another way. Which would you rather have: A bat card of Jason Varitek, or a bat card of Jason Varitek stamped with the game date of the bat's final use? I think Game-Date Stamping would inject life into the state of game-used memorabilia cards.