Breaking the Checklist Rule

 I did a thing! I finished collecting a whole checklist:

Yeah, thanks Aaron, this is quite the Me #1 thing to do for a change. 

I quite liked these "1952 Redux" inserts in 2021 Topps Series One packs. 1952 Topps is of course the most classic of classic baseball card designs essentially, and what quickly grabbed me about these inserts is a key break with the traditional style: using action shots instead of portraits. Many cards worked out very well this way:

Forgot to tag this as Best Ivy Card runner-up in my previous post here.

There is more than the usual amount of All-Stars shown playing out on the field of play here; a less common baseball card archetype for the Stars of the game.

Of course there will be good Hitters hitting baseball cards, too, as always -

Another feature I like is that the printing of the 'facsimile' signature is kept from the official '52 style. Most collectors today have more than enough money to collect actual autographs of baseball players, but that's not how I choose to spend my money. So I like seeing these signatures; most of the players on this checklist seemed to take signing the signature card seriously with a simple accurate sig and few examples of the pointless scrawls often seen on cards today. A couple Stars even add a uni # inscription:

I like seeing the tape on the bat there.

These cards were handled very well in the how-much-Zoom decision.

Another thing I like with this checklist is that there are no horizontal cards. I like horizontal cards a whole bunch sometimes, but I am burning out on them being mixed together with vertical cards, on main checklists at least; such is not usually a problem with insert checklists. This is a topic I will return to in coming weeks & posts.

Now that COMC is back to shipping cards in a normal manner after all the new problems in the 2020s that we all know and dislike, I recently just clicked my way through completing this set quickly and efficiently and - a week EARLY - these new cards pleasantly arrived at my door.

While pawing my way through the satisfyingly complete stack of 50 of these true baseball card cardboard beauties, one thing quickly jumps up from the card images, as this checklist does have another feature of pretty much ALL checklists Topps creates these days. Rookies:

Who?

Such forced-upon-us efforts reach a yet lower nadir on checklists that mix Hall-of-Famers,  Fan Favorites, GOATs, Hall-of-Very-Gooders, current All-Stars, and then all of a sudden in the middle a Rookie who fizzled out of the Bigs after just a couple quarter seasons. This checklist just features 43 players from the upper reaches of 2021 MLB, & 7 Rookies, but even without famous retired players the RC juxtaposition still gets just, weird.

The last insert checklist, that I felt moved to collect anyway, that avoided this now seeming automatic checklist content, i.e. did NOT use rookies on it, was a set of "3000 Hit Club" inserts in 2016 Update which by it's very nature precludes any chance for a 'rook to be included. There are probably others in the deluge of insert checklists amongst the deluge of baseball card products we can all assemble our collections from. But I am not recalling many such no-RC efforts right now.

As much as I would kind of like to, I can't keep this pleasing little stack of cardboard around as a stack of cardboard to just pick up and flip through once in a while. For the long-term, I am not into forgetting all about cards stored in a box. I want to see them, and of course this is where the 9 card binder page comes in:

A Tigers hot page? How did that happen?

The one-of-these-is-not-like-the-others card is the #7 card in the bottom left corner - a Casey Mize RC. As a former 1-1 pick (first player in first round) by the Tigers, Mize is known to most baseball fans so his inclusion on Topps Baseball cards is perfectly fine. (One of my weird new collecting goals is to obtain a 1/1 card of a 1-1 pick, though it will have to be from one of several failed 1-1 picks for me to pick from).

Where this might get odd, though, is when I flip open the binder holding this page 5 years from now. Casey Mize's career can still go in any direction as I write, though we won't know anything about that either way until the All-Star Break in 2024 as he will spend 2023 rehabbing from Tommy John surgery after a basically average Rookie campaign for a starting pitcher. As a Tigers fan I will still recognize Mize just fine of course, but what if that Mariners Rookie had fallen on this page? Do I want to reach for Baseball Reference dot com every time I see this page, trying to recall just who the heck Evan White was? For me, nope, not really. Even though, Yeah, I Read The Backs, I don't necessarily want to flip over a card just to figure out who is on the front. Most of the time, I want to see famous baseball players. I have an ongoing Rookie Card collection chock full of cup-of-coffee style players I can flip through if I desire, to be seen here soon.

So I decided some time ago to simply banish this goofiness from my baseball card binder. And even for Tigers RC cards, I am going with my own personal rule of assembling binder pages, like this -

No more Forgots here.

So what happened to Rookie Casey? Don't worry, he gets to hang out with Shohei forever after:

The Yelich card is the final card on the checklist, so 2 of the 7 RC can squeeze in here just fine. As it turns out, these would be the two I judge most likely I have not forgotten some years from now, still in the original sequential order, of a sort, at #7 and #14.

But that leaves 5 more cards to place in their final resting places. Where do they go?

This little set has nice clean consistent card-backs courtesy of the 2 stat line '52 design.

Another key problem with bindering up baseball cards, which increases in significance directly with the shorter checklist lengths, is that checklists are basically NEVER divisible by 9 cards. Oh how I would like to see such a thing, but that will never happen, because cards are produced in sheets and those are set up in lines and columns of 10 cards for simpler production math for the people and machines that make our wonderful baseball picture card products for us. No one really wants double printed cards as a work-around, either, just to satisfy some weirdo more interested in 9 card harmony than valuable Rookie Cards like everybody else.

As this checklist now crumbles here at my re-designated end of it, odds are pretty darn good these particular last 5 RC might not make it into eternity in one of my binders. Two of these players have already had to leave MLB fields by the ever more relentless and unforgiving application of The Data, and 2 more seem likely to follow, soon. I do think Dylan Carlson will kick around in the St. Louis outfield for another season or 3 and then one other AAAA team like the Tigers, but if I want a Dylan Carlson card to remember forever and ever, he is on a whole lot of other 2021 checklists anyway and will thus appear on at least one, minimum, other binder page in my collection. Which is true of all Rookie Card cards the way I will be collecting, and for so many Rookies, one keeper baseball card is perhaps too many for me to even keep, anyway.

The Nate Pearson card does a very nice job of showing off a Memorial patch for Tony Fernandez which was a part of Blue Jays uniforms in 2021; if that is the best such view of it (odds are more than fair), that card might become a representative in the Memorial pages I am slowly starting to assemble.

Overall I am still quite pleased with these 45 baseball cards I have deemed "binder worthy." I quite look forward to finishing off the "1965 Redux" inserts from 2021 Series Two much like these, with an action image on an originally all-portrait set that is even more colorful. For the also pleasing1992 style cards that came along with 2021 Update, I will probably settle for just a single 9 card page for multiple reasons; by the time we essentially reach 101-150 choices for this effort, even with repeats, the star power is diluting steadily and the Who? RC numbers start going up. Plus I hit the same exact sequence of 4 of those 92s - four times! Uggh. So I don't have a lot of those to pick from, anyway.

But the bottom line is, as always, collect how you want. And as the ever more dated Captain Phillips meme goes - Look At Me. I'm The Checklist Editor Now.