Few small checklists of Baseball Cards have ever created this desire in me more than the 3000 Hits Club inserts from 2016 Topps Update.
The collecting started out innocently enough. One of the cards appeared in my hands, fresh from the middle of a pack of the set with the half-covered team logos (never like), and the odd smoke-esque image fade-out on the two corners. Not a set I wanted to collect but I do like being "Updated" on the game of Baseball by simply buying the latest and greatest Baseball Cards.
I liked the card design right away. Looked truly smoky, but wasn't. Looked very 19th-Century, but like the decorative motif had died and was now returning as a ghost. Or, like it was part of a very early photograph, etched in from the past, somehow. It seemed to perfectly fit around an image of a Baseball player who had achieved the feat just over 100 years ago, at the time of card issue.
I was particularly impressed when I quickly found a very brand new member of the club:
Ichiro achieved the feat on August 7, 2016 — which would effectively be right as 2016 Topps Update was "going to press." When I pulled this card from a binder tonight, I thought, huhhh, didna know that the Marlins ever had a Powder Blue road uniform with matching accoutrements. Actually, they don't. The blue effect is from some sort of image filter used on part of the imagery for these cards by Topps, which is betrayed by the blue leaking onto the pants, but only a little bit; something also seen on the Wagner card.
Leaving that oddity aside, not noticed until 8 years later anywhoo, there were other signs of dedicated craftsmanship on the cards. Tony Gwynn's image looked to quite possibly have been sourced from the very day he got number 3,000 -
Meanwhile, the Wade Boggs card at first seemed strange:
Until one did some instant card back homework...
functional
Overall it was a simple decision to just keep these cards and work on the checklist later. I had also pulled the Ty Cobb card and largely figured that with the deliberate old-timey design, there would be plenty more where Cobb & Wagner came from; even though the cards I had to start with were largely dominated by 1980s players. I had never thought about who all was in the 3,000 Hit Club, and I was looking forward to learning all about it, via my favorite method: Baseball Cards.
Over the next several years I would just buy a card or two on COMC's Black Friday sale, whenever one was 32¢ or some similar give-away price, then file it away when it arrived some long time later. It took quite a few such casual collecting efforts to start getting enough cards to consider closing out the checklist. That wasn't difficult, because this one was automatically not open to Hot Rookies, nor newly minted MVPs that everyone else collects fiercely.
But what should have been a pleasing accomplishment left a lot to be desired, I finally discovered — this checklist only has 20 cards on it. At the time it was created, there were 30 members of the 3,000 Hit Club!
This sucked the joy right out of the cards, in my opinion. I wanted a set of Baseball Cards representing the 3,000 Hit Club. I mean, Topps created that desire in the first place, by creating this checklist. Is that too much to ask of a Baseball Card Company? Apparently, it is.
I wanted Topps to fix this.
My first desire along those lines came when Adrian Beltre joined the club in the summer of 2017, well before I had even deliberately purchased a card from this checklist. I thought, wouldn't it be great if Topps issued retro-active inserts for these types of Baseball Cards, in future packs? How hard could that be? I still think this, by the way. It would drive interest in older subsets / inserts, and that would be welcomed by Baseball Card dealers of all types. We are all Baseball Card dealers, in the 21st Century.
By the time I discovered that 10 players were missing from these inserts, Albert Pujols had also already joined the club, too, and it was clear that Miguel Cabrera would soldier on until he achieved it as well.
The missing players were so unexpected. The 2 players who achieved this before Ichiro were Derek Jeter and Alex Rodriguez. How could Topps forget them, that quick?
Jeter and A-Rod were both still well represented in 2016 Topps cards - i.e. still fully licensed for use on cards, by Topps. As I learned about the full membership of the 3K club, I did realize that for some of the early members, Topps may not have held licensing rights in 2016. Such things change over random periods of years, something most famous perhaps with Mickey Mantle's imagery licensing rights, but is something true for other players also. I rationalized that most likely, there in the mid-2010s, Panini might hold a few key players over in the other clubhouse, given their focus on producing plenty of "historical" cards while they did not have a license to use MLB imagery.
One of the weirdest cases in the 10 missing players was Dave Winfield. He appeared on plenty of Topps cards in 2015, but then very few in 2016, while he was simultaneously on Panini cards those years too. Easy to get along with, I would conclude.
But one of his 2016 cards was an obscure "Thowback Thursday" effort which are sold by Topps online only, and produced in limited editions of just several hundred cards generally. Winfield's appearance in one of the usually 5 card checklists was for a small run of 1980 Topps style cards that were each dual player cards - celebrating their entry to the 3,000 Hit Club! I kid you not.
Learning all these things was quite deflating. I wanted Topps to fix this, more than ever.
It is, however, a poor route through life to wait for other people to fix things for you. "If it's broke 'round here we fix it" is a line in one of my favorite random country songs. I knew I would have to just assemble the remaining members of the club, and the newer members of the club, on other cards, to truly have a nice set of binder pages representing the complete membership of the 3,000 Hits Club. I could only hope that all the remaining necessary players had appeared on an A&G or maybe Gypsy Queen card that would at least kinda-sorta-a-little match the design of the 2016 Update effort. Particularly given the disappointment involved, it wasn't something that was going to bubble to the top of my bottomless Baseball Card To Do list anytime soon.
Until, today, when it suddenly did:
It was just another day of Baseball Carding, which required a few more 800 count boxes to get cards out of stacks-on-desk and safely entombed in their little cardboard caskets, so it was off to the LCS. I was looking forward to examining the 2nd half of a 50¢ box I pulled treasures from last week.
I was astounded to see this. Topps was never going to fix things up for me, I well knew that. But, suddenly, Panini would!
The card backs are, hmm, no great shakes -
Let's see, we have a pointless repeat of the front image and then four lines of tiny text sitting over an equal amount of totally wasted space. Even the annoying legalese crap is pointlessly padded with empty space. FAIL.
Of course like all Panini cards (did they ever make a fully licensed MLB card? I don't think so, actually), all bits of MLB iconography have to be carefully omitted. However with color photographs, this can sometimes still turn out quite nicely:
The box I was working through held large quantities of quite minor pulls from quite a few boxes of 2023 Donruss. I way easily managed to curb my enthusiasm for the vast majority of it, though a few other cards from this will appear here eventually. As the stacks of all kinds of Pete Alonso and Christian Yelich cards that nobody wants any more kept flowing through my hands between batches of the even less desirable Donruss stuff, I steadily built a nice pile of these cards. I was particularly pleased to find this one -
Yass! A player Topps skipped over in 2016! Panini was going to come through for me and definitively fix this. They are the experts at old timey Hall of Famers, right?
I was even more warm fuzzied when I found this card:
The Hit King!
It has of course become too easy to forget about Pete Rose when one is busy collecting 21st Century Topps Baseball Cards all the time. I don't disagree with his banishment from the game, and cards; in ultra-modern vernacular he FAFO'd - almost a textbook definition, really.
Nonetheless my goal of a set of Baseball Cards of all the 3000 Hit Club members would need Charlie Hustle too. Finally I had found the just exactly perfect set for it. I set aside every single card I could find from it, then carefully sorted out the doubles. Even though many of the players are also in the 2016 Udpate version, I was leaning towards replacing the whole thing. These had Winfield, and A-Rod too. I would have a Complete Set of this checklist soon enough.
Upon reaching Home Base and plentiful devices connected to the sum of all Human Knowledge, aka this good ole Internet you are looking at, the discoveries began.
These pleasing cards that are both Pink, -&- Oooohhhh Shiny, are an insert set titled "Mr. 3000" - the "Mr." is a little hard to discern up there. The cards I had were not the base versions however, which is weird. Like pretty much every single Baseball Card made today (find me one about which this is not true) - these have no less than 8 different parallels (good luck).
Weirdness just keeps on trucking with these, too, as the "base" versions are actually numbered to /999. Whereas these are not s/n'd, in the lexicon, so one can presume these are printed in higher quantities? I dunno. But, nobody prolly cares, either.
The "base" versions are stamped on the front, a seemingly ever increasing trend I absolutely despise. The other day I saw a brand new card deliberately stamped in the sky adjacent to the player's face, where it would 100% be easiest for all the inve$tors to easily read. Little do these lazy people who actually want the s/n on the front of the card like that actually understand, is that such pitifully dumb defacement of a Baseball Card is going to greatly decrease its desirability in the future, and thus its value. That's important when every single cup-of-coffee drinking never-really-was an MLB player has 79 different Rookie Card cards.
So what I have here are the "Pink Fireworks" parallel version, for better, or worse, but I'm going with better.
That was kind of surprising learning, there. What was sadly not surprising enough was that this checklist, too — IS ONLY 20 CARDS!!! Not, 33, the full current membership of the club, which will be true for a long time to come as Freddie Freeman is still currently (2024 offseason) 733 Hits away from membership.
Not only did Panini clearly borrow a fair bit of the graphics from the 2016 effort, and maybe the whole concept in a general sense, they didn't stop there. They took the inherent laziness of Baseball Card Companies right out the door with 'em, too.
Even more fun is that of the 20 cards, A-Rod and Pete Rose are on the checklist, twice! Each get a slightly different write-up on the back, and a different unlicensed image on the front. So that wasn't a mistake but rather the lazy way to go to reach a more even # of 20 cards for simpler printing/production.
And to really rub some salt in this encore effort in failing to document the 3K Hitters, I recalled that I took a Pete Rose card out of my stack - one with a much better, front facing image of Pete. Which I would much rather have, always, than a Baseball Card which doesn't show a player's face, licensed or unlicensed.
And now, I need that card. Because I am back to square one of trying to complete a modest set of nice looking cards for the full 33 members of the 3,000 Hits Club. Once again, I will just have to fix it, myself.
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