Jorge Alfaro is a serious Dude

Sometimes, I become interested in a Baseball player solely because of their picture on their Baseball Picture Card. This is one of those times.

I never did get to see Jorge Alfaro play Baseball, live, on any of the numerous "screens" that permeate our daily existence now. That should have been easily do-able when he played in the media favorite NL East. But by the time I figured out this interest in seeing the man play the game of Baseball, he was already in the NL West, which basically doesn't exist when you live in the Middle West, unless you can watch MLB Network on a continuous loop, which, I, can not. Yet.

It all worked out in the end, however, as my Baseball Cards routinely help with such issues. I am only now finalizing the final homes of some cards received from COMC so many months ago, I forgot just when that was, and with a large new batch of cards waiting for me out there in WA. So, it was time...

The Card That Started It All

2020 Topps

That one seemed like a pretty unique Baseball Picture Card image; I can't even recall another example of "side eye" on a card. You really have to wonder just what his teammate must have done out on the diamond to earn this look from his Catcher. Though of course, maybe The Ump did it. But this one is definitely the card that brought Jorge Alfaro to my attention.

Not long after obtaining it, a bit of the perpetual chore of sorting another one of the 0-7 year old stacks of Baseball Cards permanently overpopulating the top of my card desk quickly had me stopping a stack thumb-through when I saw more Alfaro images. i.e. even before I read his name on the card. Once that happened a couple-three more times I did begin to deliberately watch for his cards in those stacks. 

Following are my finds, in simple sequential release order; any other way to do it would be anything but in-order-received, which I forgot, anyways...

2017 Topps Meijer purple parallel

(surely one of the worst designs, ever, for creating parallels, though bookended the year before and year after with 2 other strong contenders for that title)

2017 Heritage High Number

(whereas 1968 Topps cries out for a 'parallel' improvement on every single card)

2018 Stadium Club

I always enjoy Catcher-on-the-basepaths cards; one doesn't see too many of those and such cards could probably make a fun little side collection. I sometimes wonder if Catchers are less prone to being picked off a base, and/or actually less likely to generate a "CS" stat - Caught Stealing - than players from other positions, when compared to their sprint speed. Where's those analytics guys when I need one? 

I do have an enjoyable side collection of 'leading off' cards; perhaps one day this card will migrate to a new home.

2019 Big League

I will forever be disappointed with a simple design choice in the 2nd year of the Big League set; I liked everything about the set until the designers somehow created a pastel version of a tech-grey plastic Baseball pennant, like a mini black hole sucking all the color right out of the cards. Things improved the next year in the product, but that was a product no one could purchase, cuz, retail flippers changed it to an online only product. Perhaps some day I will revisit 2020 Big League, hope so.

As for Jorge up there at the plate, well, hitting is serious business as we all know, and he seemed to prefer remaining in focus on the concept, even when posed for a Baseball Card -

2020 Heritage

I love those cards from the rare cloudy day in Florida. Quite fitting for the theme at hand, here. And this is one of the better looks you will find, on real cardboard, at the Marlins' fantastic shoulder patch. Heritage is frequently quite good for showing those off. And it's a little stealthy given the automatic-via-software placement, but that is one heckuva signature. I might have to investigate those, further. Drag-drop that one a little to the right and down slightly, and this card would improve, muchly.

2021 Topps

Those teammates out there better get it together.

2021 Heritage

Another great Florida card. I quite like those; I just don't care for paging through 350 of them at a time, year after year after year, exactly same as year before, most of which refuse to let Florida (or Arizona) actually appear much. 

Card That Fell Off the Bubble

2018 Topps Update

I sooo wanted to include this card in this little project, but, alas, my collecting rules these days preclude mixing horizontals with verticals. So this card will have to wait its turn to appear in the always ever more wonderful Horizontal binder, with more examples of the Lurking Umpire, which is rather freaky on this particular piece of cardboard. Do you hear that Darth Vader breath on this one? I do. Run, Jorge, run. Or, is this card an out-take from some lurid Topps Attax set that was supposed to be called The Catcher With Three Arms?

The Final Piece of the Puzzle

2018 Topps Now

("El Oso" means "The Bear" in English).

Alas, no more Jorge Alfaro cards are being produced these days. Only a few appeared from his half season of work in San Diego, and none from his even briefer stints at the MLB level in Colorado, Boston, or another short stop in Washington this past September. One should never count a back-up Catcher out, however, until they themselves decide to move on. 

After the 2021 cards I found I did not feel any of his Padres cards matched this goofy little page of Baseball Cards, and Jorge languished in my "Players" box until I turned to the vast library of every-Baseball-Card-ever-made known to us as COMC, where I found the just exactly perfect image to wrap up this collection. Once you scroll through the entirety of Alfaro's Baseball Card oeuvre there, you will see plenty of more expected Baseball expressions, including sufficient happy ones as seen here. I do hope Señor Alfaro can continue his career en el Béisbol, perhaps at an academy back home in Colombia, or maybe re-climbing the coaching ladder to the Bigs with one of the 30 MLB minor league systems, as he laboriously did in the mid-10s, appearing in Topps Pro Debut for four years sequentially, possibly a record. Until such a never-say-never deal may appear some day, I will quite enjoy this particular entry in my Players Collection, courtesy of Baseball Cards.

The Result

I like Nickname cards

 

This concept is just perfect on Baseball Cards.

I would surely like to collect all Nickname cards, but these have an odd cheap/expensive binary dichotomy, sadly to say. 

The first such cards I can recall were in Heritage sets, where they were deliberately super short printed. Of course, the lower the print run and higher the expense of a Heritage card, the happier most Heritage collectors seem to be. I always kinda wished Topps would have made up some obscure /5 only image variation in the product for all the superstars, so the Richie Rich collectors could all get even more extra frustrated out-bidding each other to try showing off a completed run of such cards.

So when the inaugural 2018 Topps Big League set appeared with a whole checklist of these cards, for cheap, I was quite pleased. I discussed the whole concept at that time, and even rustled up a jealousy-inducing image of a full set of 2018 Heritage Nicknames. A weird deal of Topps never quite deciding if they should make Nickname cards as parallels or inserts, one of the themes of that post, is still with us today. As are the existence of sometimes cheap, and other times expensive Nickname cards.

As you can probably tell, I prefer the cheap versions. Ultimately I didn't collect a full set of the '18 Big League cards; the Nifty Nine page I did decide to keep has a few clues as to the reason why:

Turns out, some nicknames are just kinda blah. Though they do usually make sense, as on the Molina card there.

And, even on this one -

That's from Big League's sophomore season in 2019. Which is amusing enough to keep, particularly as a collector of the Detroit Tigers, and Bubble Gum Cards, but the similar deal on the '18 Big League Rizzo card is kinda nudging me towards finding a better example.

The '19 Big League checklist delivered a solid keeper, one even maybe the high-rollers now consider wanting to own despite it being a card with probably > 5,000 copies and from a "Kids" set of cards. Something particularly true if they lust after the '18 Heritage Nickname RC, but can't find for sale anymore, unlike this gem:

That, along with the Judge card at the top of this post, is an example of one of the rare times I have deliberately inve$ted in Baseball Cards — I purposely bought extra copies of them for 75¢ or so on various COMC Black Friday sales. That has worked out well, on those two cards at least, as they head towards being actual "double digit" Baseball Cards, i.e. each are approaching a $10 price point. But as usual with such decisions, it has also been a failure with similar purchases of Ronald "Sabanero Soy" Acuña and Juan "Mercenary" Soto. No, wait, Soto's says "Juanjo" on the card. But each of those would cost me a dime or so in losses if I sold them now. So it goes, when you are a low roller.

The unfortunate thing about those Big League inserts is they were only done the first two years of the now departed product. In 2025 one could say Topps kept the old Opening Day / Big League concept rolling with the "Celebration" product, which straight re-used some Opening Day & Big League insert themes, but without any new Nickname cards. They also bailed on the concept of low price-point Baseball Cards "for the children" by only issuing it in $60 ~ $70 "mega" boxes that all sold out instantly in retail stores, at least where I live. So it always goes in this often infernal Hobby.

Anyhow one reason Big League probably dropped the concept is that MLB dropped the concept that largely fed the creation of these cards - the "Player's Weekend" of games with special uniforms with the Nickname on the back, as seen on all the cards in this post so far.

It was never easy for Topps to get the actual nickname on the uni on to the Baseball Card -

That is my 2nd Topps Now card, one I still only partially own as it remains at COMC for now. That one came from a whole Player's Weekend checklist in 2018 when that whole deal got rolling; I don't know if the Topps Now line might have repeated the exercise in 2019. I kind of don't want to find out, because I like Nickname cards, but I don't like deliberately short printed cards that cost an Andrew Jackson, each, or even multiple Old Hickories, or even Benjamin Franklins, as with the Heritage cards. 

My first Topps Now card also came from that checklist, for Walker "Ferris" Buehler, which made for a fun card, but I am finding it unlikely to put together even a single Nifty Nine page for Buehler, as Pitcher career arcs are just depressing, these days.

Once the fun flair of "Player's Weekend" was replaced by "City Connect" uniforms, Nicknames became an uncommon sight on Topps cards, although the Archives product dabbled in them in 2020:

and again from way downtown / on the back, in 2021:

which is cut/pasted from this -

That particular iteration of this concept was particularly disappointing for me for multiple reasons, despite the surprise addition (i.e. not used originally) of Nicknames to the re-use of the "Topps Big" design from the late 80s. Sadly in classic lazy man fashion, Topps skipped creating new cartoons on the back of the cards, for one, but they also wrecked the fronts by making them "foil" cards which then largely obliterated the In Action photo used as a backdrop on the classic two image style front of the card. So, no front scan to memorialize that set of bad decisions; sorry, not sorry, for such a sorry effort.

Meanwhile along the way I didn't really keep track of Heritage keeping the concept going; perhaps it has been an annual tradition since those 2018 cards, perhaps not. Another don't-wanna-know deal, essentially.

I do however know Nickname cards were part of 2024 Heritage, because when I saw the images of a few, the inevitable Desire that rules all Baseball Card collectors started growing again.

Heritage still has that not-quite-an-insert, not-quite-a-parallel checklist confusion the first Big League cards had. That's because they use regular card backs with the same regular card number. Which is only a problem when you want to shop for the cards on COMC, where they become listed as card#.2, all mixed in with those dumb base cards nobody actually wants any more.

Perhaps that's just more better-not-to-know angle to these, I guess, not seeing a whole checklist of them at once. I really doubt I will ever own "The Martian" card since it is for a Yankees Rookie Card card, sigh.

But along the way last year I stumbled across a card image of another current Yankee, and not a Rookie Card card, and not even a 10-time All-Star MVP player either — one who is just, gasp, Very Good, and thus not on the GOAT track to Cooperstown, all of which (usually) means not very expensive Baseball Cards.

These Nickname cards seem, to me, like they would be absolutely essential for any Player Collection in particular; a big reason I detest the super low print runs of them in Heritage as Topps caters to the people buying cases of product rather than those of us who only buy one box at a time.

Nevertheless, I persisted. Recently, after declining on several Andrew Jackson+ copies scrolling through my Baseball Card "feed" on eBay (I am so hungry), a seller finally threw in the towel and just cut the price of one of these down to just "single digit" territory, so I instantly mashed the button. Because I have yet another casual Player Collection going for a player who seemingly has a Nickname printed on all of his Baseball Cards, anyway. What I know for sure is, this one will be just exactly perfect on his eventual Nifty Nine page:

What's better than an Oooohhh, Shiny card?

 

Actually, I'm not all that completely devoted to Oooohhh, Shiny Baseball Cards. 

But — sometimes.

I've posted this card before, also as the lead/thumbnail card for you all to see on blog rolls, when I was pondering the use of stars on Baseball Cards. This card features stars all over the place, starting right at about dead center on the card, which has to be pretty unique in that regard. 

I think it is likely this card will be my 2024 Card of the Year, whenever I finally finish up with the delightful "The Neon" set of 2024 Topps Baseball, which occasionally fits along in starts and stops. I picked up a couple more packs of 24 Update just last week, for example. I think I can safely anoint this 2024 Topps Baseball Series One insert as my 2024 Psychedelic Card of the Year, right now. 

This card is just fun to have, in-hand. I sometimes wonder if there will come a day when we can make 3D scans of cards. If such a thing were possible, this would be one of my first experiments. When holding this card, the rainbow-ish palette for the exploding star behind Riley there starts to shimmer and catch the light. Maybe Tolkien's Elves would start wars over this thing, it's so purdy when light is bouncing off of it.

So aside from anchoring a page of these superb 2024 inserts, and also appearing amidst my collection of the Detroit Stars uniforms as seen on Baseball Cards, I began wondering if there could be another way to enjoy this ridiculously overly-fascinating slice of cardboard enjoyment.

And thus the question that titles this post. Could an Oooohhh, Shiny card become even better with the mysterious extra layer of Oooohhh, Shiny known as a "Chrome" Baseball Card?

hmmm

Surprisingly, the Chrome version of this card somehow dials -BACK- the Oooohhh, Shiny, when enjoyed in-hand, like Baseball Cards should be. In this case, the "Chrome" seems to be nothing more than an extra layer of some sort of translucent plastic that means you should probably wash your hands after holding this particular Baseball Card, before eating anything. (The new Chrome cards falling out of all packages of Heritage these days display this trait on the card backs, which look like they just came out of a shrink-wrap machine. Weird.)

Still I wanted to enjoy this card forever more on yet more binder pages than just the two I initially assigned this one to. 

I could just attempt to find 8 more Oooohhh, Shiny Riley Greene Baseball Cards, which here in the most wonderful season of Detroit Tigers Baseball in about a decade, will become ever easier. I even have a first page-mate, amidst a tiny collection of 24 Topps parallels, which includes a 10th, 'overflow' card, featuring Riley. I'll probably just go ahead and work on 'clecting that project, too. 

That triple inclusion in my various Baseball Card binders still didn't feel like, enough, particularly when I would happen to notice this complete gem of a Baseball Card selling for just 35~40¢, each - can you believe it?

After a couple rescues of this totally awesome Baseball Card from the fairly undeserved fate of being so ignominiously cheap, I finally figured out just what really is better than just one Oooohhh, Shiny Baseball Card-

The Result

Repeats? Oh, yes. Nifty Nine #14

Baseball Card collectors often find that they have seen the picture on their brand new Baseball Picture Card somewhere, before — usually on another Baseball Picture product of some sort.

Instead of complaining, I recently decided to just go with a flow on this...

The Card That Started It All

2011 Topps Baseball Wal-Mart Hanger box exclusive insert

This wasn't quite the card that started it all, but was the first card I obtained for this project. I didn't dream this one up until some years later:

2018 Big League

I enjoyed the debut set from the Big League product quite a bit; I almost completed it but the grey border ultimately dissuaded me from that in favor of just some pages of highlights, one of which is a classy page of "All-Time Greats" on this classically understated design. But since I had a duplicate of Hammerin' Hank, I had to decide just what to do with the extra slice of Baseball Card perfection.

So I decided to just start putting Hank Aaron cards into my "Players" box to see what happens on the way to a low key 9 card Player collection page -

2020 Topps A Numbers Game insert

I got off to a bad start with these particular inserts; it took me a few more seasons of laughing at the absurdities of 2020 Update to realize just how much I liked Uni # cards. I will be collecting this one - a simple enough task for a high print-run insert checklist with zero Rookies on it - probably during the next Black Friday week on COMC.

In the mean-time when this great #44 card went into the Players box, that particular alphabetical sort had another 2011 card in the stack with it, waiting for entry...

2011 Topps Baseball Topps 60 insert

...and that's when I finally saw it, and this project was launched.

It all remained in slow motion until I was preparing a shipment of loot from COMC by looking for On Sale notes in the ole watchlist and I decided it was simply time to pull this trigger. After pulling this image from packs four times, I now had to spend actual George Washingtons, both round ones and a few rectangulars, to git r done:

2011 Topps Diamond Anniversary "Home Team Advantage" Hobby Shop promo

Yes, this makes three 2011 cards using this image (so far). Yet that didn't slow Topps down the next year -

2012 Topps Baseball A Cut Above insert

This one has a somewhat atrocious card back / theme that makes me shudder to think what the rest of the cards on the little checklist may have been like. Plus a straight glaring grammatical error. I'm not looking forward to Chat GPT creating my card backs but I fully expect it; this one has about that level of quality. Yech.

Topps then seemed to lay off these easy lay-ups for a few years, until -

2017 High Tek

Never one to discount double check things, nor consider shame in the creation of their products...

2018 High Tek

As I scrolled through the voluminous Hank Aaron listings on COMC, looking just for this image, I found a few surprises. Such as the possibility I could likely, yes, repeat this exercise with another extremely similar image of this famous batting stance, shot from the same vantage point and with a very similar splash of sunshine on Hank's right leg, but a different uniform. And I already had 2 cards using the image. I never have scrolled through all 2,600+ Aaron cards all over again to determine for sure if 9 cards exist with it, though, maybe. A batting cage shot is also creeping upwards on such a list also.

The biggest surprise came 3 decades previous to these 2010s cards however:

1986 Donruss

This one's not even a photograph but rather is a Dick Perez painting/illustration of that same photo. It's also not quite a regular "Diamond Kings" card in that this is a card explaining "The 1986 Donruss Hall-of-Fame Puzzle," which can be enjoyed by this regulation 3.5"x2.5" card, or a 15 piece "mini" puzzle also the same size as a regular card, or a full 63 piece 8.5"x11" puzzle one can assemble. Maybe the full deal there would nicely backstop this oddball collection. Could be fun.

I think this might partially explain why Topps became so fond of this picture - perhaps, it is in the public domain. Or, the original Perez-Steele gallery / Donruss rights to the photo had expired by 2011, don't know. From the card offerings, it appears Aaron's licensing went to Donruss for one year in 2008, then no Hank cards appeared in 2009 or 2010, but then in 2011 the Topps floodgates opened.

Regardless, I thought it perfectly anchors this little expedition into the crazy world of minting "new" Baseball Cards of "old" players.

Card Most on the Bubble: despite the general (though small) level of absurdity to this still enjoyable page of Baseball Cards, I am thinking about tweaking it. Which is because there are still more cards using this image, including a 1983 style card, a design I quite like. There is also yet another 2011 card from Triple Threads that would get this thing to four cards from a single year, which has some weird sort of appeal, too. Or maybe, five -

2011 Topps Baseball Kimball Champions insert

So my initial thought was one of the Tek cards would go, because I am not a fan of transparency in cards, particularly once they grace a binder page. And I'm just generally afraid to touch them. Maybe, both will have to go. For now though,

The Result

The Happy Miggy is a collectible Miggy

Now here is a little project I've been looking forward to for a while. Time is the enemy of such projects of course, and Father Time is always undefeated, as the saying goes in the sports world.

But I have been winning a few battles lately...

The Card That Started It All

2013 Topps Opening Day Ballpark Fun insert

2013 Topps Heritage

If you own a copy of this one, or the corresponding card in 2013 Topps Baseball, I suggest you "set it aside" / put it in some plastic, if it is just floating around loose, still, for some reason. This card likely depicts 3 Hall of Famers simultaneously, so it has more traction than most equally printed base cards in those 2 sets, and ultimately probably more than any of those cards outside of perhaps the Manny Machado Rookies on the same checklist. That's not to say this is even a double-digit card, but it is also a long ways from a 20¢ card like the vast majority of its checklist mates.

I have faith that the 2013 Heritage card miner did their level best to find a 2012 picture of Beltre with an actual smile and it was just a bit of misfortune that one couldn't be found to match the basic happiness of Cabrera and Trout here. Smiling Beltre cards are not unusual. One could -probably- assemble 9 cards of Mike Trout cracking a smile, since there are surely well > 1,000 different images of Mike Trout on a Baseball Card. But I expect that would take more legwork than you might expect, once you start gazing upon Mike Trout Baseball Cards, particularly the newer ones.

2014 Topps Archives

2015 Topps Gallery of Greats insert

This card confused me for a long time as it kicked around, waiting for enough page mates to hang out with. That's because in 2013 Topps, 2 checklists of very similar inserts in Hobby boxes only were called "The Greats" and another was "The Elite" but I kept thinking somehow this card was part of those small sets.

Anyhow this was still a little before the time when Topps would routinely anoint the current favored Rookie as right up there with the All-Timers as it creates a checklist. Overall a classy card, and a classy checklist. Posed Miggy is not usually this happy; that's something that generally comes out on the actual ball field.

2019 Big League

2020 Stadium Club

I always like the Logoman, even upside down.

2022 Topps STARS OF MLB insert

2022 Topps All-Star Game insert

This was the inaugural year of adding two "Honorary" All-Stars; I believe Albert Pujols was the NL selection. The only downside about that is a personal one - I already forgot who the 2 players were in 2023, and 2024. Doh! (Or was this concept already forgotten? Exhibition games are just so forgettable.)

I do like it when the All-Star Game uses never otherwise seen variations of actual team uniforms like this.

2022 Stadium Club Chrome Beam Team insert

I have never, ever, understood what the conceptual is behind the long-running "Beam Team" inserts in Stadium Club. Laser Beams? But at least I finally recently found the perfect card to anchor down this happy page of Baseball Cards. Now I can go back to not understanding these inserts again. Wave goodbye, Miggy.

The Result

My first 2024 completed Baseball Card project...was very Dangerous

Well in my eternal endeavor to be playing with Baseball Cards that are still relatively "current," I finished out a small project last night.

Here is the #9 card in the, you guessed it, Nifty Nine assemblage: 

That's a "Hobby Foilboard" parallel, obtained from a 5 card pack of such that comes inside a Complete Set as sold though "Hobby" distribution - i.e. not in the Big Box stores. It is numbered to /265. I am quite looking forward to sorting out the complete 2024 Topps Baseball set and placing it in a binder.

The scan is a bit of a surprise in that in-hand, the Foilboard pattern is a pleasing mithril-like silvery-blue that goes very well with all the red card elements delivered by both The Neon 2024 Topps Baseball design, and the always striking Red Home Alternate uniform for the Braves. Lately I have been thinking that colors on cards become reflected in scans of cards/parallels that have any variety of foil or refracting or chrome or whatever printing tech applied to them. i.e. that maybe if Kelenic was sporting the Blue Home Alternate uniform and 2024 Topps Baseball had selected blue in The Neon "BRAVES," — would the Foilboard then still show all this red coloring in the scan? Hmmm.

But the bigger surprise came when I did my Blogger Quality Control Check of looking at a large-scale preview of that scan, on my computer screen, before I uploaded it for y'all to look at. And there, it appeared:

Does Jarred Kelenic bear a Ring of Power? 

That scanned Foilboard suddenly looks like he is handling a shallow blooper there just above the Cracks of Doom.

If that IS a Ring of Power, it sure hasn't granted him much power hitting the Baseball, however. Let's hope he finds a way to wield the Power, for Good.

Looking for hidden cross-over symbolism on my Baseball Cards wasn't what the project was about though. It was a much simpler effort to simply "put away" some of the various 2024 Topps Baseball parallels I managed to pull from packs, last year (still sounds weird to think about 2024 that way).

They sure were purdy, it seemed to me, so I wanted to keep a few. Let's see what Topps sent out, to my collection:

Green Crackle Foil /499

I have no idea why the term "Cracked Ice" seems to have become "Crackle" now

Purple Crackle Foil /799

(are those Brewers Team Socks? An investigation is warranted, I think)

Blue Holofoil /999

I guess my scanner is just determined to show red in the holo, instead of the mithril.

Gold /2024

Gold Foil

Meijer Purple

Retail Royal Blue

The Royals get their own team color parallel and the entire rest of the checklist is forced to participate. Strong work, Kansas City!

Rainbow Foil

There are of course many more parallels than these. How many more? There one gets into the Baseball Card terminology weeds rather quickly. Is a card stamped on the front a "parallel?" Is a card printed sans ALL design elements (the "True Photo" cards) a "parallel?" How do Printing Plates count in the total? What about the Topps screw-up in creating the "First Card" 1/1s that weren't stamped on the front?

Beckett wisely mentioned there are "more than 30" parallels for 2024 Topps Baseball, and that seems the best way to think of the total. Way more than just one Gold to rule them all, as at some point in ancient Baseball Card history.

I'm sure I would enjoy owning even more than just these 9 styles, and commenting on them all, and these, some more. But that wasn't the point of this little collecting project, which was to just find a place to keep these purdy parallels I pulled this year — all of these reached my hands via purchasing the packs that held them. That gave the assemblage a little more Star Power this way. And overall is still a nice way to assemble some Baseball Cards without any personal bias about favorite, or least-favorite team, or player. Plus when Johan Rojas becomes a unanimous First Ballot Inner Circle GOAT after just his 4th season in MLB, I will be filthy rich with this page of Baseball Cards all safely tucked away down at the bank Safe Deposit box.

And mostly, I just wanted to see

The Result

Man, that sure is purdy.

And therein lies the danger.

I could sure enjoy owning 116 pages of these.

But, I think I am safe. The 2024 Topps Baseball design feels a little stronger than my beloved 2013 Topps Baseball design, something which probably flows out of the 2-tone, black-white border, something maintained on only 2 of those 9 cards. On the regular base cards, that border functions very well to highlight the color on the card, perhaps better than a pure white -or- a pure black border would do.

I also own a 10th parallel from 2024 Topps Baseball -

I -think- this is a Silver Crackled Ice, or whatever; unnumbered

I -think- these arrived in the retail "Super Boxes" as an exclusive

I guess that Riley Greene card can eventually land on an Oooohh, Shiny page of Riley Greene's cards; my only plan for now. But it sure is purdy, and purdy cards look even purdier in the company of other purdy cards, so