1992 Redux, redacted

 

I quite like the 1992 Topps Baseball design. Clean, efficient, colorful. Maybe a feint ehco of Art Deco with the rounded ends on the smaller 'fader bars,' for lack of an accurate term to describe them. Nicely double framed image but with the image given permission to break that inner frame. I never did care for the weirdly pointless, stretched rectangle photo of a baseball diamond on the very plain-jane card back though.

Back at the time I did not collect this one; I was still casually working on the beautiful 1991 Topps design and 1992 was a peak summer of my touring with a famous band — Baseball Cards are eternal, so I knew I could always come back to these, if I wanted. I occasionally dream of buying a "vending box" of these, which would not be difficult. There is a massive supply of the cards and no expensive ones in that set. So, maybe, someday.

In 2017, 1992 finally made it to Archives but few noticed, probably because of some guy named Judge. I look forward to extracting that box of cards from a stack and working on those 92s — again, someday, but that day is probably closer than some attempt at doing 1992 Topps Baseball up completely right.

So in the fall of 2021 I was quite pleased to see that 1992 had been selected for the 3rd installment of these "Redux" sets after 1952 and 1965 had graced packs of S1 and S2 that year. I quickly dreamed of putting the 50 card checklist together as I was still slowly placing cards in stacks of those first two. All the sweet players were there, it seemed...

...but things got off to a very slow start as I was purchasing "hanger packs" to build up a nice stash of 2021 Update. Those yielded four of these redux cards per "pack" - so far, so good. Except I then proceeded to hit the same four cards - four times in a row. I had 16 of these cards, but really I only had 4.

Strike one on completing this checklist. Nevertheless, I persisted:

You didn't think I could let a Miggy entry on a checklist go by, did you? This would be just about the next-to-last time he appeared on an insert checklist.

By the time a checklist theme is being used in Update after previous S1/S2 efforts, things start to get a little strange, and this checklist is no exception. The Super Stars have already been added to such lists, often multiple times, as with these first 3 players, who also have 1952 and 1965 cards, as well as probably 1986 style cards that year too. I am not collecting those, unfortunately — a pet accident wiped out the beginning of that particular effort and I doubt I will re-start it.

So by Update we start seeing more B-listers:

I still quite like this card with it's always apropos combo of red, white & blue.

The KB card is one of the four that I started out with four copies of. 'round about the time I got around to creating a final want list for the 1952 cards from Series One, I started reading the 1992 checklist more closely. Any checklist in Update is going to have the most Rookie Card cards because, Mike Trout, or something. This one features about 1/3 RCs and many a FAIL there. It also has some big Stars who just simply hardly play Baseball any more (Giancarlo Stanton, Jacob DeGrom) even though they still earn millions upon millions of dollars annually anyway; and then some post-checklist-creation FAILs such as cards for Trevor Bauer and Fernando Tatis.

The whole thing started seeming more like a deliberate send-up celebration of aging All-Stars now on sad, fan-disappointing fat chunky contracts - eh, Colorado? But then there are the Naturals, in this case the basic Trinity of Super Stars who debuted in 2018, who basically make every Topps checklist, ever, just as these players seen so far did in the mid-2010s. So, I went with the concept, and paid out an entire whole Dollar for a real deal 2020s ★ all these 2010 fade-aways could orbit -

Now this train is bound for glory. I like the perfectly placed Logo Man there, and it is also nice to see Shohei without the words "State Farm" scrolling through the background for the 129th time.

I passed on adding his regular mates named Ronnie and Juan; they get plenty of binder slots elsewhere. So I went back to the glory of the '10s:

I really want to declare this one "on the bubble" and I can tell you that the Mookie Betts card on this checklist is a perfect Baseball Card, though I do not own one. But I can't cut a Bubble Gum card from a Baseball Card collection, no matter how much it bums me out to watch my very own favorite team light 23 Million Dollars on fire annually. 

Sometimes, you just gotta keep 'clectin -

Ahh, a nice Update to a nice career. This might be my only non-Pirates Cutch card to make it to my Hall of Binders, though maybe he will sneak onto another page in an Archives checklist from some other design I like, or on those nice 2018 cards, we'll see.

Who you callin' faded?

Another nice Update to close this one out, for a nice second act in a career. This was one of Arenado's first Cardinals cards; it would be nice to see him get some October playing time for a change but the Central Divisions have such an uphil climb to that concept any more.

The Result

1992 Redux