I never thought this would happen to Me

 

I am collecting Super Short Prints now. I have mixed feelings about this, although I quite enjoy owning that there newest edition to the collection.

Collecting expensive Baseball Cards has generally been off limits to me. Not just due to financial limitations, but personal ones, on the decision making between spending money on Entertainment, vs. other life choices.

I finally admitted this to myself a little over a year ago, when I deliberately purchased some SSPs, which is somewhat different than stumbling across an exceptionally good deal for one, which is always tremulous, when collecting Baseball Cards — all the marketing phrases hit you simultaneously: "limited time offer," "act fast," etc. You know they are true because - other people collect the exact same Baseball Cards you desire.

Along the way recently I have had some successes with this always-sure-to-be-very-difficult collecting goal, and some setbacks, too. So I thought I would pass along a few experiences that could possibly help someone else ooohhhhhing and ahhhhing those partially wonderful /25 Baseball Cards.

One of those has happened 3 years/times now - December seems like a key month to have a good amount of bummin'-around-money set aside, absolutely ready for that rare card to suddenly ping your ebay search that has never pinged before. It seems logical that the Christmas season is a likely time for a card owner to decide it's time to generate a little extra cash. It also seems like there will be fewer buyers to compete with, this time of year.

That Aaron card there is from 2013 Update, and specifically the SSP checklist; I think Update may have been the product that first introduced the concept of 2 levels of short printed image variations. It was my introduction to the infernal concept anyway.

I truly lusted after that card in particular because of the workings of a card back text feature, "The Chase," about a player's chances of becoming one of Baseball's "All Time" leaders in a given statistic. And it did not disappoint on that regard, something that will make it onto the Sea Turtle Cards blog oh maybe by the year 2036 or so. (I do expect to become much more 'off the road' in another year or two and should have way more time to spend on Baseball Cards).

The reason I recently "pulled the trigger" on it was the creeping horror of understanding that the rare RCs from that checklist are only a small portion of the battle. The dozen+ Hall of Famers included amongst the 25 entries are probably now more difficult to obtain than the Rookies, as the Rookies end up in the hands of people hoping for a large appreciation gain on the card, whereas HoF players all have dedicated Player Collectors who always want Moar cards of their "PC Guy", Moar, Moar, Moar. And a good portion of the 13 Update SSPs actually feature 2 HoF players on the same card - so Willie Mays collectors want the above card, too. Arrrrrgggggghhhhhhh.

I'm not like that. 9 cards of one player is enough for me.

So now that the card in question has scrolled off your screen, can you recall anything about it that might have resulted in me obtaining it for a "reasonable" price (less than $100, in this case) ? 

The card has a severe crease across the whole top of the card, about 1/5th of the way down from the top edge. And that is fairly easily viewable, in-hand, and there is actually a slight loss of "eye appeal." In the scan above, it is most visible via the small white lines around Willie's eye brows. 

But for me, the appeal deficit is quite slight, and one quite worth saving .... $150 ? Who knows. I felt it was fairly unlikely I would ever see a copy of this For Sale, ever again, in any condition. Which is the even more frustrating part of attempting to collect a checklist like this one. Demand potentially very high, supply so very, very low.

Such concepts of eye appeal vs. likely official grade culminate in the expression "buy the card, not the grade" and can very much work in a collector's favor. Which is what happened for me finally obtaining this long-desired Baseball Card:

This copy has a short, barely perceptible surface wrinkle, well hidden in one of the black ink portions of the card. If you hold it up to a bright light and angle it just right, you can see it. Would a card grader find that? Some times, probably, maybe most of the time, or not. If they did see it, then the card would be an 8 or less, whereas the Aaron card is probably, I don't know, a 4 perhaps. I don't and will never have a lot of experience with those nutty concepts. Recently I read someone complaining about older PSA "slabs" being "often very over-graded." I truly pity such people.

That Cole card became an unfortunate keystone in this whole collecting concept, as I expected it to be one of the most expensive cards on the 25 card SSP checklist, forever and ever. Which is no longer the case, as all those Hall-of-Fame cards will likely retain their now high prices, forever and ever, and I could have purchased many of them for a fraction of their current values while I was hung-up deciding on whether to ever purchase this card for a far higher price than the HoF cards, years ago now.

I still have a love-hate relationship with the card. It is such a great card, the super anticipated 1-1 player (not the same as a 1/1 Baseball Card; 1-1 refers to a player selected as the very first in an MLB draft, like Henry Davis and Paul Skenes were, to name 2 pertinent examples) making his dramatic entrance to a game, with the big outfield wall team logo behind him while he wears a rarely-seen-on-cardboard Pirates black warmup jacket. And of course I fully expect the Cole-Pirates situation to repeat possibly quite soon on my favorite team, with Tarik Skubal, and all over again for the Pirates in a few years with Skenes. Sometimes I thoroughly dislike this ever more coast-tilted Sport. That particular Baseball Card is a horrible reminder of MLB's current structure.

And — why couldn't that be his regular Rookie Card card? It would be just exactly perfect. Some other random image, like say the one on his regular RC, could be on the /25 SSP version, inserted mainly to help create re-sale value in the box of lottery tickets. Such a card would still have plenty of dollar value, because a solid majority buy the serial number, not the Baseball Card. For soooooooo many purchasers / "collectors," card image and design are basically irrelevant. So ..... let me have the good photos, cheap, dammit!!!! Sometimes I thoroughly dislike this Hobby.

I did have some basically tangential Good Luck with finally landing the Cole as he spent 2025 off the field, for the inevitable Tommy John surgery rehab - a point where "investors" (how I loathe needing to use that word in relation to Baseball Cards) can often begin to "cut their losses," potentially. 

That likely helped move multiple copies of the Cole card into For Sale activity over the last few months, which becomes a huge help to the collector wanting a rare card. We of course all exist in the tension between sellers wanting as high a price as possible and buyers wanting as low a price as possible. But when 2 sellers attempt a sale of the same card simultaneously, the buyers have leverage that is absent when only one copy is For Sale.

Not having a lot of experience with purchasing expensive Baseball Cards, that now seemingly simple concept was a bit of an "I coulda had a V8" moment, or maybe a "I didn't sleep at a Holiday Inn last night," or probably plenty more cute social aphorisms. Also recently, that basic concept well assisted purchasing this card via Best Offer -

That one has no defects aside from my scanner's usual struggle to discern the white boundary correctly. However the card still cost about double the last price I could remember for it, only 2-3 years ago. So it goes when you have to pick your Baseball Card battles oh so carefully.

The Gehrig card is also now a card in the lower tier of (potential, because few of the entries are ever actually For Sale) prices on that 25 card SSP checklist. Best illustrated by me purchasing it for just about half of what the John Kruk card on the checklist sold for a week or two later. Players from the 30s will never be as collected as players from the 50s regardless of overall fame; not even the presence of Jimmie Foxx on this card will change that as a huge amount of Baseball fans don't even know who Jimmie Foxx was. The Stars of those days just didn't have enough Baseball Cards depicting them, unlike the Post-War era players.

I am mostly enjoying this collecting by design goal - all of the 2013 Topps design cards. Even though it hasn't yet been used for a full design re-use checklist (only 36 years to go for its use in Heritage), a semi-regular scattering of such cards do exist. And one of them is a /87 Aaron Judge Rookie, which hasn't appeared for sale in several years now, and will almost certainly never be in my price range.

That is also true of a whole number of 2013 design cards issued in 2013, despite my halting step onto the Update SSP checklist. 2013 Topps Chrome has short printed image variations too - and most of those are now 4 figure cards. Yes, as in > $1,000, each. That's because they are probably printed in an edition of /10, and there are people just like me who want to complete that checklist, too. So I also know I will never own the really cool Miguel Cabrera Chrome SSSP, which shows off the Detroit Tigers special green uniform worn on St. Patrick's Day down in Florida.

And then 2013 also included a set of autographed cards on the Sea Turtle design, most well-known as part of the Wrapper Redemption program which supplied us the /150 "Blue Sparkle" cards which are a darn purdy parallel. The small 'packs' of those included randomly inserted autos, including things like a Manny Machado RC, and Hall of Famers like Gwynn and Ripken, amongst a few others, with copies limited to just 10. I also just recently learned that 2013 Series One & Two also included similar cards of some of the same HoF players, inserted into packs though not noted on official checklists. These cards had an edition of only /5, and I will almost certainly never see one even for sale, and even if then the price will be in the mid four figures.

Me, I still shudder at the idea of the numeral "2" fronting the price of a three digit card. Pulling the trigger on the numeral "1" a few times now is still creating Doubt in my mind, which is not an enjoyable concept to attach to collecting, at all. I saw a fork in the road, and I took it. The question is .... how far to the next exit on this ever more lonely road? I think I have about 12 more exits to reach the end of this road, which is now likely to head deep into unknown parts of Nevada, although there's always .... next December.

That guy

 

I just scanned a Sea Turtle card! I feel like I just climbed into the WayBack Machine. I do miss writing about the Sea Turtle cards and still think I Shall Return, often, but, Life, happens. Work on my parallel collection of the 2013 Topps Baseball set does always continue; I picked up a key "Factory Orange" card just yesterday & Black Friday Week COMC sales are rolling right now.

Meanwhile I have been also slowly chipping away at another Sea Turtle project, collecting ALL Baseball Cards with the 2013 design. That is a much tougher assignment than collecting 990 parallels, because some of them were printed in editions of only /25, it is thought, and depict some _very_ famous people.

The card shown above is from the 2013 Pro Debut set, which I quite enjoyed completing. I still like that Puig card, too, a nice simple (and, authentic, not 'shopped) Minor League Baseball Card and somehow without that weird Pro Debut stamp Topps seems so proud of for some reason. We'll see some 2024 Pro Debut here on the blog sometime this winter, I expect.

Back in that previous decade, Yasiel Puig cards were a big deal, for a few years at least. We all know how that turned out. But in the short run, back then, the To The Moon! prices of Yasiel Puig cards definitely kept me from thinking I could ever hope to complete a certain set of the 2013 design cards, even though I very much Desired to. That would be a somewhat dreaded term to hear in the universe of Baseball Cards, when you discover one of these exists for a player or team (or in my case, a design) you Desire to collect, completely. That would be the horror, the horror of the "Super" Short Prints.

Although issuing "photo variations" had been a thing for several years already before 2013, I believe it was the year that Topps added the "Super" innovation to the concept, resulting in the acronym "SSP." This was after the 2013 Baseball Card year had started simply enough, with these "Great Catch" photo variations in Series One:

These were neither all that difficult to actually see at least one example from a pack, nor were most of them that expensive to purchase, if you wished. I have a memory of reading somewhere, many years ago now, that it was thought a print run on these might be around 3,000 copies each and thus nearly 1000 more copies than a Topps Gold parallel.

But naturally a checklist of only 25 cards is going to have a high degree of variability around that word "expense" as there would be some All-Stars / obvious future Hall of Famers included, which brings set collectors additional competition from player collectors.

So I steeled myself to shop carefully for the bigger names on that checklist, which included a > $100 card for this guy named Mike Trout. 3,000 copies, & > $100 prices. Bummer. These SP photo variations are (were) probably my most expensive Baseball Card Desire, outside of finally finding a specific 1/1 from 2013 Series One.

Several years ago now I bit the bullet and handed over a Benjamin for the Mike Trout Great Catch SP. And concluded that the worst was over, as the Bryce Harper card was only a $30 card. It is becoming perhaps an Irony that in the long run, the Harper card could easily become more valuable than the Trout card, as their career arcs steadily diverge now.

At this point I still need a few more of the Great Catch cards, including David Wright and Alex Rodriguez, which each have a New York collector base value above their Hall of Very Good career pedigrees would suggest. And I still need one of the two Mike Trout SPs issued in Series Two; I have the 'autographs' card but still need the 'sunglasses' card which was also a > $100 card for many years but has now probably halved in value. A pity I didn't wait longer on the 'autographs' SP. 

Most of those struggles between Desire and Life Goals were not even yet on my radar screen when 2013 Topps Update was released. I didn't even conceive of the all-parallel 2013 project until a year later, either. So the Update Short Prints, which seemed to consist of just multi-player poses from the 2013 All-Star Game, first didn't interest me and then didn't appear difficult to acquire for a couple-3 dollars each, some day. A few of them sell for < $1 today.

And the concepts and scarcity of the "Super" Short Prints were even more fuzzy to me. All I knew was, Flaming Hot Rookie Yasiel Puig had some photo variant cards that were far more difficult to obtain than all of his other Rookie Card cards and since the last thing I wanted to collect specifically were Rookie Card cards, I basically ignored the concept quite contentedly.

Except for one card, which I can't scan for you as I don't yet own a copy. That was the Gerritt Cole SSP, a card with an RC logo, so.....

That card is often referred to as the "Black Jacket" card as it shows him leaving the bullpen still wearing a black jacket. Given the hopes for the Andrew McCutchen led Pirates right then, the arrival of their recent 1-1 pick was a big deal in Pittsburgh and that image perfectly encapsulated those feelings, giving the card great cachet not just some of the time, but, instantly. As soon as I saw an image of it, the inner-Gollum that I expect every Baseball Card collector is familiar with piped up instantly: "I wants it."

I began watching the price of that card at some point in 2014. It has only ever climbed in price and I passed on several chances to buy it at around $75. That small fact is a reason for my dislike of Gerrit Cole, which is in no way his fault. I would still like to go fishing with him, if he enjoys that hobby, something I would say about almost every human being on the planet. What I really don't like is actually the structure of the game of professional Baseball today, which is perfectly illustrated in Cole's career and is now only getting worse as TV revenues decline but player salaries can only go up, up, up, up, up — to the point that Gerrit Cole now receives $15,000, give or take, for every single Pitch he throws. And the real loser is the fans of the "have-not" teams that comprise a whole lot of Major League Baseball today.

Shelby Miller has a Super Short Print photo variation card in 2013 Topps Update as well, probably with the same print run as the Gerrit Cole card. It is an incredibly lazy effort by Topps in that it features him just wearing the Cardinals' special "Sunday Home Only" cap instead of their regular cap, in a pose that makes it look incredibly similar to his Rookie Debut card, his "Factory Set" Rookie Variation card, and also a little bit like his regular Series One Rookie Card card. That same-same -ness has probably made a few of the "Blue Cap" SSPs be lost, right from the get-go, amidst stacks of totally worthless "base" cards that not every box opener actually wants any more. A possible fate for many photo variation cards of course.

And yet despite that basic rarity being probably a touch more acute than the Gerrit Cole SSP, Cole's card now sells for $250-ish while the Shelby Miller would go for half or less of that, I would guesstimate, if one were to appear for sale, which is because only oddball set collectors such as myself would seek it as it is very unlikely Shelby Miller has any dedicated player collectors at this point. I would further wager that if every single Shelby Miller Baseball Card ever made were somehow auctioned off simultaneously, individually, the 13 Update SSP would now be his single most valuable card.

All of that is the basics of Baseball, and Baseball Cards today. Between the Puig Rookie Card card mania and the permanently rising Cole card, I tried the best I could to blot out the knowledge of those 2013 Topps Update Super Short Print photo variation$ from entering my mind at all.

But that's never going to happen in our always dynamically scrolling "feed" of Baseball Card images, particularly when routinely shopping for the things online. 

One day early last winter, this next card appeared on eBay -

This is a card I had no real desire to ever own, starting with the simple fact of it not actually being a "Baseball" card at all. But that nagging Desire to own every 2013 Topps designed card will never leave me. Whatever you do, don't ever mention the Chrome SPs in my presence.

And as you can see, I pulled the trigger. The price, was right. That made the decision rather simple as I believe it was offered for only about 20% of what it would have fetched at auction. I could barely mash the "Buy It Now" button fast enough.

#Profit ? No, I am keeping the card. This of course has now set me on a problematic course as my inner-Gollum is louder than ever about that Gerrit Cole card. And of course the rest of his checklist mates, such as the famous Teddy Kremer card, which is viewed as a great "feel good" effort by Topps, unless, that is, you are someone who wants to complete the 2013 Update SSP checklist. I, and I believe many other collectors, would be much much happier if every photo variation card came out in far more reasonable print runs. Instead, every single player card in the Topps Baseball set, and many duals, now have "Golden Mirror" SP variants in limited edition. Act Fast! Buy Now! I do my best to never see what any of those look like.

Just a short week or so before the opportunity to own the ludicrous card just shown fell on me, I had shushed Gollum on the idea of owning a copy of the Kremer card for just $200. Like oh so many decisions, I began regretting that the instant the card sold anyway. Now, another one (graded & everything!) is on-sale for a cool $1000, or 50% off, if you act fast.

Sigh. Baseball Cards are always such a great hammer driving the nail of Buddhism's 2nd "Noble Truth," the one about Attachment & Desire. There is no escape.

For now though, I will continue row, row, rowing my Baseball Card boat somewhat happily down the stream. Now that I have one of the top 3 most difficult cards on the checklist, that makes the ho-hum double digit cost cards into very easy purchase decisions, which started with this one:

That is a nice nod to amusing Baseball Card history on the part of Topps, though I have never been clear on why these gloves actually exist beyond supplying a fun image to use on a Baseball Card. I had never paid it any mind in particular beyond that basic disdain for superfluous Rookie Card cards so I don't know how expensive it might have ever become. It now sells for maybe ten bucks, probably mostly to people like me, and that is still over-priced compared to most other regular SPs on that checklist, a phenomena known as "bag holding," which is now mostly, but not completely, abating for Yasiel Puig cards. That card was not one of the "Super" Short Prints but rather was just a boring regular SP.

My next two pick-ups were originally on the 'tough' list -

For the longest time, I thought the "arms raised" image was from the SSP list, but the "sliding" card was potentially from an even-fewer-printed Super Super Short Print list. Uggh. It is a fun card though from a famous incident where Puig un-necessarily slid into the completion of a Walk-Off Home Run. He was a fun player, and I did like that, so this card is a fun "get." 

I mostly thought there may actually be 3 levels of Short Prints in 2013 Update because that Puig "sliding" card was priced higher than the "arms raised" card, when I occasionally saw a listing for them. That, and the Teddy Kremer and Prince George cards were/are rarely ever seen actually for sale. 

Now, I am doubtful of that, as I can't find any online speculation, anywhere, on that concept. I also managed to stumble across the "population report" for some of the SSP cards graded at PSA, a concept I care about not-at-all and had thought was locked away behind an "account required" rule on the PSA website. (Wrong). There, some of what I thought might be the even more limited cards just mentioned have actually been graded more times than some of the just 'super' short printed cards. So there is likely just the SPs @ > Topps Gold level, and the SSPs @ maybe /25. A conundrum on the SSP quantity calculation, something never disclosed by Topps, is the 110 card structure of the printing sheets used in 2013, as 25 checklist entries is not divisible by 110 in any way. The mysteries.

It is nice to see all 3 of the Puig variants together finally. And those were a nice lesson on the folly of paying "peak" prices for Baseball Cards, before the latest can't-miss Hot Rookie gets promoted straight to Cooperstown, as were the Trout variants in Series One & Two.

Still waiting for me up ahead are that darn Cole card, and the even tougher every-Reds-fan-wants-one Kremer card. But also, many more 2013 variants featuring genuine Hall of Famers, sometimes 2 at once. A Baseball Card depicting Willie Mays standing next to Hank Aaron is never going to be as cheap as the other cards on the same checklist, which is far more understandable than the usually temporary peak prices of limited edition Hot Rookie Card cards.

At least Hall of Fame Baseball Cards are more fun to obtain than so many of the gimcrackery, dance-junkie-dance 2.5"x3.5" creations emanating from 1 Whitehall St. these days. Even when the card isn't particularly rare, or is of a famous player who just isn't quite to Finger Lakes New York standards, like the inimitable John Kruk, or This Guy, as we know:

Kicking off card season with a Blast(er)

I wouldn't normally make my first baseball card purchase of the year via the Blaster format. I rarely buy the things at all, though I do have a weakness for the "box cards" in the Big League product. It just feels like I am paying a premium for the so-called "Patch" card in each one, that I very rarely ever wish to own at all, for one.

The other problem with blasters is the way collation works in baseball card packaging. The sheet-cutting and partially random assemblage of the cards is designed to do one thing: there will not be a repeat card, inside a given package. 

However, when one buys two such packages, you will "hit" identical sequences of cards - and then you don't get just a duplicate card, you receive multiple duplicates. Many multiples. This is probably magnified even more in the "hanger box" format, although that has usually offered the lowest price per card. So far, I haven't seen any hanger boxes or "rack"/"fat" packs, either, this year and I have to wonder if I ever will.

This year however, anyone wishing to just buy a few brand new baseball cards while grocery shopping can't take any chances on hoping to find some desired pack format. It is a minor miracle to find new baseball cards on a shelf at all, so if any are seen they must be purchased on the spot. Which is how I found my first blaster of the 2021 baseball card season - a single solitary blaster, half hidden behind some Magic The Gathering boxes of some sort.

A little later on I did find just a few examples of my preferred format but that will make for a nice future post, with some interesting, non-blaster cards to look at. Today I want to check out the rest of the blaster as a way to ponder 2021 Series One a little more. Fully absorbing the "first pack" is nice and all, but there are 84 other cards in each blaster - now a $25 blaster, where I shop. What did I find?

This is a perfect example of why I grade this design a "so close" - everything works here, except those almost vertical design elements, and outside of the ridiculous player name size. Many have commented on how they make the cards "line up" in a stack and would even in a binder page, but I don't think that is why they exist like this. Rather, aligned elements like this make it easier to print and most importantly, cut the cards accurately. Something ever more important in the collecting era of "10 Snobs" who insist that every single baseball card Topps makes MUST arrive to their greed focused hands in 100.0% flawless condition, including "centering," or it is off to Social Media they go. Not just some of the time, but instantly.

I still quite like this Alex Verdugo card, with his cool glove, harmoniously color balancing the Green Monster and the team colors, and the way the wall even makes it looks like he has a green wristband on. Perhaps the perfect card to post today - St. Patrick's Day.

Meanwhile I think this card will kick off another random little side collection for me - cards featuring these - "full wrap?" - sunglasses that I am seeing on more and more cards lately. How long will baseball players favor these? I fully expect my Topps Baseball cards to document this.

But I'm just not sure I will ever quite get used to looking at 2021 Topps Baseball cards in the horizontal format.

An S1 card I always anticipate is some World Series cards from the previous Fall Classic, like this one:

I didn't have much invested in the Series last year, with 2 teams from the coasts featured, and was unable to watch it at all while out on a remote job at the time, and no ability to head into a pleasant little drinking establishment with a television, either. So I was depending on Topps to show me at least a little of what I missed. This card does that wonderfully, with a great image break taking primacy over the design elements. Overall, this is probably my favorite Kershaw card in some time.

Another routine part of Topps Baseball is the Rookie Cup -

Floating player, floating Cup.

And it's always nice to pull card #1 in a new set:

And card #27, too:

Mike Trout is routinely card #27 on many Topps checklists these days, a tiny holdover from the then firm break with tradition in 2013, which I could now write as "way back in...2013" - when I started this blog. Time flies, when brand new baseball cards appear for me to purchase on a relentless, basically year-round schedule these days.

That card makes me think State Farm has certainly got it's money worth from that bit of advertising placement at Angel Stadium of Anaheim. And also makes me wonder if they have ever considered hiring Mike Trout as a promo guy of some sort. Seems like it would be a good fit - the perfect wholesome baseball player, who would surely make a good neighbor, and one with basically perfect statistical production, year in & year out - a sure bet almost like - insurance.

I did find a bit of a surprise in terms of a year in, year out tradition in Topps Baseball for about 25 years now - a special handling of card #7.

That long run of Topps Baseball sets going back to 1996, of either a Mickey Mantle card, no card, or a carefully selected Yankees card at card #7 is over now. The Mantle family moved on to do business with Panini rather than Topps back in about 2017, iirc, but Topps kept some minor tip o' the cap to The Mick in the Topps Baseball set even afterwards.

2021 #7 is such an odd card. The center of the card is basically empty space while a touch more care in overall composition might have nicely accented the basic card design. And I certainly never expected to find the word "dab" on a baseball card of all places, given it's 21st century association with something else altogether.

Meanwhile, I also pulled the Yankees team card from this blaster (why not make it #7?), which is also odd -

On some of the horizontal team cards, the white line around the "design element" (what else can you call those weird parallelogram like 'things') just inexplicably disappears. 2020 strikes again I guess, with more baseball cards being produced than ever before, all done via Zoom meetings, perhaps. Meanwhile on this card at least, the design element has a clear antithesis in a whole 'nother professionally played sport, which at least gives you a mental name for the design elements on these graphic error cards.

Another card I always watch for in particular, this time of year, is one featuring a previous equal to the #27 card, Miggy:

And Miggy is looking good here - this bodes well for the 2021 Tigers.

Speaking of which, for the first time in a long time the Tigers have highly anticipated Rookie Cards in a new Topps Baseball release, and I pulled one in my first purchase -

What I particularly like about Tarik Skubal is that he is not some high-rated first round prospect who already has Bowman cards selling for 4 or even 5 figures. Rather, he is a normal product of baseball scouting, drafting, and development. It's way past time that my team gets some fresh young talent this way, rather than whatever they could get via their timid trades of two month rentals, which is how they picked up another Series One Tigers card I was looking forward to:

Though I am a little less optimistic about Paredes than Skubal, I do quite like the prominent view of the Al Kaline patch the Tigers wore last year, when I had the lowest chances to see them on TV of any year of my life. Those 3 cards pretty much satisfied me completely on the Favorite Team portion of the beginning of my 2021 baseball card season. I guess there are upsides to starting with a blaster after all.

2020 was of course a completely unique year in basically every way, and along that way, we all knew this card was coming -

and this one:

which was my first card to show me a fan cut-out in the stands. I know there will be more, and better, such cards in my future S1 purchases, but this is a card image I was expecting (and oddly looking forward to) from the first rip of the first pack.

A great thing about the Topps Baseball genre is the occasional repeat of a classic -

This new entry in the Wrigley Ivy checklist perfectly shows off the possibilities of this design + image and I can almost forgive that too long left side design element. Almost. I will return to that shortly. This year's Topps Baseball features an even more classic Wrigley Ivy card I quite enjoy:

It's like Topps has brought the Social Media concept of "trolling" into the set with this one, which perfectly cardboard-encapsulates the probable rise of the South Side of this year, while the North Side likely treads water.

As for images that perfectly match this design, I found several -

Now this Spencer Howard RC has me wondering - does this set feature the most Powder Blue uniforms since, oh, maybe 1982 or so?

I would say - Yes, yes it does. Probably later this year I will attempt to tally up how many Powder Blue baseball cards I find this year. I think it will be - a lot.

That is another of those 1952 "Redux" cards though I can't for the life of me figure out the need to use the weird psuedo-word "Redux" for these, nor why an insert clearly included to mark the 70th anniversary of Topps Baseball sets doesn't include the special Topps 70 (or is it 70 Topps?) logo - but for once I am glad to see Topps basically miss an obvious chance to thematically tie a few things together, as these "Action 52s" that I quite like are much better without any superfluous graphical notations.

Especially since such sure, why not appellations will likely be found on all the other inserts in the release:

I have always been a fan of 1986 Topps so I quite look forward to obtaining some "new" 1986 cards. But I don't know anyone who celebrates the 35th anniversary of anything and that notation on these reprint inserts is pretty much played out - but you know it will be a huge deal all over the Topps Baseball set, next year. A prediction so easy, it's like falling off a log.

Meanwhile I might need a duplicate of this Ortiz card to help fill out some binder pages of a half-baked Opening Day insert checklist from a few years ago called "Heavy Hitters" which well illustrates the comical challenge of maintaining upper torso muscle mass as you get older.

Inserts have changed over the last several years; I believe Topps dialed down the insertion ratios of most of them to give collectors more of a chase challenge and possibly to up the re-sale value of their products; something I can only partially agree with. When I like an insert, I don't want it to be rare. When I don't like an insert, I am more happy to not find them in my packs. Particularly all those insert checklists that mix certified Hall of Famers with maybe-maybe Rookies which then makes for big holes in the checklist years later after most of the Rookies inevitably fail to reach Cooperstown immediately after their first At Bat.

This year there are a couple ridiculously low input low hanging fruit type inserts given the "Anniversary" theme of the Topps Baseball set, and one upside is that the design of these inserts locks out brand new Rookies completely, as with this one:

These are nifty little reprints I would quite like to assemble - but they are also basically low insertion rate reprints that I am unlikely to find more than a couple three of over my coming S1 purchases. But since they are just reprints without hot Rookie Card cards included, I'm thinking they will be very cheap to acquire in the "aftermarket."

Speaking of which, the point of most box break recaps for most readers is the hits, man, the hits - did I "hit" anything in this blaster? Anything worth more than 0¢, the basic value of all of the cards I have just scanned in for you, (possibly temporarily) outside of the 2 RCs shown? Why yes, yes I did:

This is technically a "super" short print, though it took me quite a while to realize that. Usually the photo variations have some sort of theme to the image selections. Other times, Topps simply phones it in, as with this card. Nonetheless if I can get around to ever selling this it would probably pay for the price of the blaster. Which is both good, and bad. 

'Bad?' Yes, this "hit" card I found is the reason it is so hard to find baseball cards for sale, and I don't care to encounter problems when I just want the simple pleasure of ripping a few packs of brand new baseball cards. Of course I enjoy the faint chance of "hitting" a card worth more than 0¢ in my packs (the 'good'), but if I had to choose between buying packs that might hold a $20 bill and a guaranteed chance to simply buy a few packs of baseball cards, I would take the the guaranteed availability. Meanwhile that intoxicating chance to find a $20 bill in a pack of cards, or $200, or, even - $2,000 - leads people to purchase so many of these baseball cards that this all now makes it difficult for people who just want to buy the cards, a few packs at a time. Like me.

Ultimately, a Topps Baseball set is remembered for the basic design of the basic baseball card and how that works out for any random player your mind selects when thinking about the set. Over the years I have started to notice the way I think a few teams put uniform #s in odd spots, though I can't recall another specific team example right now, when I need one to share. I have noticed the Reds uni style including the uniform # on the player's belt before this card. 

But it took until I found this card to even notice the player name is written in a team color match, normally a basic, and good, part of a baseball card design. In 2021 Topps Baseball, however, the uniforms have to do the talking:

The rest of the Hobby Box

When I write up a blog post, I start with a pile of cards to scan. I don't worry too much about how long it will take to describe those cards, which might be a process of checking some other web links, downloading other images, who knows? Once you start opening packs of baseball cards, who knows where you'll end up?

Opening packs the last several years, one type of card surprises me most of the time - I always forget minis will be in the pack:

I think the Mets are becoming my favorite team to collect, graphically at least. Their orange-and-blue just says "Baseball" to me, more than any other team.

I had pulled just a few of these previously this year, and hadn't thought to collect them. Until this slice of team-colors-baesball-card perfection. I also have finally figured out a perfect way to "collect" any type of card I care to define - just pick my 9 favorites for a binder page. I am moving towards permanently keeping cards based nearly completely on their visual appeal, and that is nice and easy now for the mini cards with the new mini binder pages - the news of the year in enjoying baseball cards, if you ask me.

I saw the Jose Abreu card from this checklist on a blog today, and that had a cool tree in the image, so that one will join the page, and I'm sure I will be able to find 7 others that work as well as Cone's card with the great Mets leg stripe and crazy flow of lines here, there, and all over the card.

It also really took all the way till the end of the collecting year for me to realize how much the base Topps design this year owes to 1989. Maybe this has been commented on elsewhere, I hope so and would like to hear more thoughts on that idea. Maybe that all happened in August of 2013 when the design was revealed, 5 1/2 months before any of us could hold the cards in our hand. The heavy use of foil this year and the just simply inadequate use of color doesn't lead to the quick comparison, but much like the 1987 & 1962 sets, 2014 should be forever linked to 1989, and that was no accident; I am a little amazed it took this mini card for me to notice all this. Maybe I'll even finally do something with that shoebox full of 89 cards - probably in some sort of project divisible by 9.

Sometimes lately, another team is feeding my orange card jones:

It's such a pity the images have to supply the color on the cards this year, though fortunately most of the teams all have nice colorful alternate uniforms to create colorful baseball cards with. Personally though I would be happy with Topps deciding black is the secondary color for the Marlins, not blue. And this jersey makes me wonder how long it will be until we get to see Marlins Man on a baseball card. Perhaps he is a bit of a polarizing figure for that, but if you had his type of bank account, what would you do with it? Maybe if Topps would drop the zoom zoom zoom on the World Series cards some day, we'll get a cameo. His own card would amuse me too - a run of "Super Fan" short-prints, perhaps? If only I could Tweet @Topps, but if I were to join Twitter, well, you wouldn't get as many blog posts, that I'm sure of. I don't see adding more Social Media to my life in the future, at all.

There was one last '89 mini that caught my eye; not sure if it will make the cut for a favored 9 of the 150 issued, but I kinda like this one:

What, no Eye Black? (Which is what caught my attention here). I'm not sure why road grey makes the team color base here, as compared to the all-orange majesty of that Mets card, though I like how using road grey unis with team names on cards turns out, every so often, and the script of the 89 design works perfectly for that, so this might make the cut. Or maybe I'll just hope there are 9 Mets and Marlins 89 minis to work with; I'll probably just shop the whole checklist on COMC which will likely end up with 50 copies of each of these, on sale for 40¢ each. I hope.

A big part of ripping packs is watching for your favorite players; if a fave is an All-Star you are all set in Update, but other times, you've been waiting all year to see the player again:

Nate McLouth is not one of my "favorite" players, but he is the close as I have to a Hometown player as he lives just 90 miles away. I think about him, and thus baseball, and thus baseball cards, whenever I drive by his exit. Maybe if he had started out in the AL I would have been following his career more closely. This is actually a pretty good Night Card, almost as good as they get any more in the Topps Torsos sets; the stadium lights reflected in his helmet make a crazy pattern that mirrors the wave of the design somewhat - you'll have to see that in-hand with your own baseball card.

I thought this could be the last card for McLouth but he is signed for next year; though as a 4th/5th outfielder these days, I suspect I won't see him on-card again till next October, in the Update set.

If a favorite player is an All-Star though, Update will be giving you a new entry in the PC:

Another set, another great Salvador Perez card. This card almost makes me want to consider how Topps decided who gets black-ink-on-secondary-team-color and who gets white ink for the team name, but since that is such a tiny portion of the card, who cares? Anyhow, Perez always seems to be in a good mood, or a nicely focused, game-mode on his cards, and this one is another keeper for me.

Another player I have started to follow, but mostly only when I pick up his new card, is Justin Turner:

Although it perhaps remains to be seen if he will be starting at the hot corner for LA next year, as in playing every day, or playing a lot of days off the bench all over the infield, I think Topps will always try and put him on a Turning Two card. I'll be watching.

Probably one of my favorite cards this year was in Series Two, of this player:

Although I always like cards with imminent bat contact, I always hate cards with helmet-less players doing something with a bat…especially actually hitting a baseball, not just posing.  So though Frazier had a pretty good year and made his first All-Star Game, this card might not make it onto his eventual best-of 9 card Player Collection I am slowly assembling. 

That card did have some good news for me though - it is clearly from the Home Run Derby, but it is just his All-Star card - there were none of the goofy Home Run Derby cards this year. The reaction to those was never that great, and now perhaps they are gone.

I had one final non-Tiger to watch for as part of a Player Collection, due to their recent cards, and that was Chris Sale:

Shudder. The hat, the hat. Uhh, no thanks. I think Major League Baseball was going for the triangular graphic design used on several teams' batting helmets back in the 70s with the All-Star Caps this year, I guess, but instead of a nice spare triangle, we got a trapezoid. Or a rhombus. Or who knows what other crazy geometry word I haven't used since grade school; though even grade schoolers could have told MLB officials how ugly those hats are. This Chris Sale card won't make the Hall of 9 on his page either.

Topps, though, likes to purchase photos of players wearing unique caps, let's wash away that All-Star cap right away:

That's not a super unique ball cap, just the special one Cardinal cap the Cards wear on Sundays at home, or about 11-12 games a year, though probably very few in between the trading deadline and the image deadline for the new Update cards. I could probably use that fact to figure out what game that photo was from, if it wasn't such a boring photo. I can't understand why Topps doesn't give just a few more pitchers some of the casual cards in a set - relaxing in the dug-out, at-ease during batting practice, something, anything, once-in-while-at-least, Please?

But Topps also likes capturing the Memorial Day caps:

At least this card works well with the design, we get a cool red glove to admire, and isn't such an overall waste of the usually wonderful horizontal card format.

And Topps likes July 4th at the ballpark:

Now this would have been a nice image to zoom in to a torso from the belt up, like the Lackey card, and really show off that once-a-season cap, but instead we get a featured view of Jurrjens' butt. Is there any method to Topps Torso sets? No, I'm pretty sure there isn't.

I did pull one of the shortly-printed photo variations in this Hobby Box, though I haven't finished checking for sparkles or saber-metric card backs, and it featured a Check Out My Special Cap shot too:

I hope Topps didn't pay a lot extra for that photo, though again it would have been nice to have something as unique as a New York Yankee wearing a hat that's not blue featured a little bit more, as in this shot from July 4, 2014. And I don't even like the Yankees. 

The hot RC in this set, the Jacob DeGrom, has a nice photo variation with the Mets camo uniform, though I think they might wear that every Sunday. I want that card, but I'll probably wait a few years unit DeGrom is a solid #3 starter, which card collectors think is just about total failure, and pick up that particular SP for a buck somewhere.

I did get a unique Yankees card in this set though, it was quite noticeable after pulling 1,209 Yankees cards in my baseball card collecting career:

A warm-ups / Batting Practice uniform. The road version no less. I was just babbling the other day how I wanted to see a few new wind-breaker cards, and though I am still waiting for that, we did get fair and balanced journalistic coverage of the Titans of the American League East:

This set just simply needs these uniforms, I'll just say, though I really have no idea why MLB teams have special uniforms just to wear for an hour or two before a game.

Ahh, the mysteries of baseball, our most quirky sport, which surely must serve up our quirkiest sports cards:

Oh, Snap! I really think Julio is about to give us a real Oh, Snap, on that one. And this could be the first baseball card ever featuring earrings. Yep, earrings. There are actually two more cards in this set with that new feature, believe it or not, so it would be hard to say which card broke that barrier; though I have to think this is the first set of cards to include such an unexpected image, you can never count out 1990s baseball cards on any such question. Maybe this is just the first one to feature a pair of earrings, as are the other two you can discover on your own.

I guess when you wish to see baseball players in their warm-up duds, be careful what you wish for. These can supply some nice casual images though:

I like that card, though knowing Cruz is from the Dominican Republic really sets up it to contrast with this one:

I mean, Apple Pie, Chevrolet, and Derek Jeter, am I right? What could be more American than that picture? I remarked on the first card I pulled from a retail fat pack of update, the Francisco Cervelli card, how the Yankees never put their iconic red-white&blue top-hat and bat logo on their uniforms, and here comes MLB All-Star uniforms to prove me wrong, and I finally get a good shot of a New York Yankee in a red hat as I was just wishing.

My last Derek Jeter card? Well, my last active roster Derek Jeter card at least. I expect one final Derek Jeter sunset card in 2015 Series One somehow, and possibly an image variation of that, and some 2015 insert action, and then will come 2016 baseball cards with some more new Jeters, somehow….what's the over/under on the first year Topps doesn't print a new Derek Jeter card? 2021? I'll go with that in the pool.

I like Derek Jeter cards though. I'll miss him. Yes, there really is a Kalamazoo, and his cards always remind me that I used to hang out there while he was in high school there.

Usually, many of the All-Star cards are just not all that remarkable, but this one definitely invites a hearty What's Up With That?

You just very, very rarely see this body language on a baseball card. And you really shouldn't. If you don't know anything about what body language indicates in life, well all I can tell you is that this is very negative. I thought this might be a little bit of Topps Voodoo as they selected this picture during Oakland's post All-Star-Game offensive implosion. Of course, Topps had no way to know that would happen, or that the A's would lose the quintuple coin-flip game that was the truly wild AL Wild Card game this year. And this card came out well before the A's traded Norris to the Padres for prospects, like seemingly every other MLB team did recently (where did the Padres get all those prospects anyway? Maybe it really is a big advantage to play like a AAA team for the last forever, we'll see). I think something dramatic (and dramatically bad) happened in the Oakland clubhouse right after the All-Star game, and this card knows what it was, but won't tell us.

So I just hope St. Louis can keep it steady-as-she-goes next year:

Two of these cards? Not nice, Topps, not nice. Redbirds in a blue uniform…these All-Star cards are just going all weird on me this year:

When the rain comes, baseball players have to just grin and bear it I guess. I'm happy to get another Rain Card, those are pretty darn rare.  But it sure looks like a nice sunny day on all the other All-Star cards. And more of these red teams wearing blue uniforms…these cards are really confusing me now:

From the Independent Leagues to the All-Star Game, truly a Cinderella Story? Nope, the Minnesota Twins just get to wear an All-Star Game patch on their uniforms, not on their baseball cards, for the most part. It's too bad Glenn Perkins couldn't have been pictured in the Twins alternate uni, as on this card, so you could try and figure out which League Minnesota actually plays in, which would probably stump baseball fans on the coasts.

Colabello was the feel-good story of the young season in April, but then pitchers probably watched the video and their coaches probably analyzed his strike zone and poor Chris was toast. Maybe we'll see him again in next year's Update set if he ever makes the Toronto 25 man roster, as they picked him up off waivers recently.

The All-Star cards delivered another probable first this year:

One player, same set, two cards - 

Two teams? Maybe this has happened before, I'm not totally sure. It almost happened twice in this set though:

I can't recall the confusing details about Samardzija being named an All-Star for the NL but then not pitching for the AL after his trade to Oakland, but this card really confuses me. Topps has conditioned me to know that only Closers celebrate an out on their baseball cards. Did Samardzija move to the bullpen out there in the land of Billy Ball? I don't get this card. At least the Torso-only image for Pitchers stays intact, I guess.

We almost need a special set of baseball cards to keep up with the Oakland A's any more. They push all their chips in the pot, get great cards on the turn and the river, but then it turns out they didn't read the flop right in the first place, so they fold. Topps card-back writers will have to be oh so carefully polite covering all those baseball transactions in the next several sets.

Another confusing thing about Topps and which player goes in which Series of cards is their handling of some of the higher caliber Free Agents. During a season, everybody knows who some of the top Free Agents are going to be when the season ends. Except Topps, it seems.

This year's winner of the Shin-Shoo Choo Memorial Most Topps Base Cards award is Brian McCann. Let's review:

And finally, after the season is over, we get an Update card:

Why, Topps, why? Actually, I get why. McCann was a Free Agent that signed with the Yankees after his Series One Braves card was prepared (though a good 9 weeks before it went up for retail sale), so us loyal collectors needed a new card of him with the Yankees. Fair enough.

And I like that the Opening Day set gets a few unique cards because of such transactions of the upper 1/3 of the players in MLB.

So why do the same players then get a new card in Chrome and Update, which is cool … but not all the other players? Particularly in Chrome? Why do so many players get repeat images across multiple products, but then some players get four different cards in these products? I like that, quite a bit actually, even though I don't like the Yankees or Brian McCann. It can't be all that difficult to put different photos on different baseball cards, can it?

It certainly isn't for Shin-Soo Choo cards:

So we have a tie for most Topps cards this year as Choo comes back strong to retain a share of the title again this year. Both of these players have photo variation cards in these sets too, so if you Player Collect McCann or Choo, this was a very good year.

I just can't understand why more of the highly mobile players these days can't get more unique cards like these here. Does Topps think we are all just a bunch of geeks so obsessed with player and/or team idolatry that they don't need to take this approach across all their sets? We'll just dutifully purchase their new cards in multiple copies even though they use the same image? Of course, many collectors will, but then they have to ask themselves - why were less products picked up at Wal-Mart this year? Why does shelf space for Topps Baseball seem to decline slightly all the time at various Big Boxes?

And as usual, mentally pondering fine Topps baseball cards like that fine 2014 Topps Update Shin-Soo Choo card there after a fine Christmas 2014, these baseball cards always leave me with one recurring question - Why?