Clap Your Hands Say Yeah

OK, I cheated. I could not show you my First Card of 2018. I like these cards. But I just can't lead off a way-too-rare post on this blog with a downer card like this one:

What a bummer. Seems like the right omen for the upcoming baseball season I am expecting, for my team. Though I always feel bad for various baseball card people I know who root for the Orioles, and will never forget working in Maryland one spring right on Opening Day - impressive fans in that state - my thought on the Orioles this year is that it will be a matchup with the Tigers that I will pay extra attention to, because it might be a rare series they could actually win. Sorry, Baltimore.

So, the 2018 Topps Baseball Cards. I like them. I read a key review last night and I agree, the best of the Full Bleed Era so far. Still not as perfect as could be, but we do have some color. Sometimes, an excellent amount of color - 

I have really come to prefer baseball cards showing a teams "alternate" uniforms. I wish we could get a whole set of cards with just the 'alt' unis, home or away, since Topps is so parsimonious with handing out color lately. That Semien card there came along early in the pack and was the perfect flash-back anti-dote to last year's cards - where Semien was my First Card, and his alt-Yellow uniform really helped that one, too. It was a weird pack - 2 Oakland Shortstops in the same pack (Chad Pinder). I can never keep track of the Oakland A's roster, even when listening to their broadcasts  a couple times a month. Baseball cards certainly help, but only some.

So, the ... Water Slide? The thingie there that supplies most of the color on the card, or at least the bright color. Is it 2014 all over again? That swooshy device on the cards that year was nice, but the regrettable 'File Folder' team names and the use of foil for the swoosh made everyone forget it's pleasing roll across the bottom of the card. Well, maybe not so pleasing if you are the type that easily gets car sick riding in the mountains. So the Water Slide seems like a hey-let's-not-let-that-otherwise-solid-idea-go-to-waste revival on the part of Topps here. I like it. But the other main thing that pops into my head whenever I see it is:

I don't know why, but there it is. I'm pretty sure I will be the only person that thinks of this set as The Rolling Stones set, but there you go. Maybe these cards will motivate me to check out their new release of early 60s BBC Broadcasts. I loved that era when they were pretending they were cutting sides for Chess Records just like their heroes.

And now the baseball cards are scrolling away, let's see what else is in my 'pack'...

A perfect baseball card. Very well lit. The image flows right on to the Water Slide, and your eye rolls right back to the slugger's bat. For an instant here on-screen you might think Schwarber swung and missed because his eyes look closed, but that's just an on-screen thing. In-hand, these cards are great and you can see his eyes just fine.

I mostly pulled that card to scan for you because of something else - the back. The card fell just a few cards in to the pack and it was the first one I turned over for an update on the ups and downs as Schwarber's career has been a bit of a water slide ride at times. Let's take a ride down to the bottom:

Ugh. Another year without complete stats. I just don't like that. Perhaps, yeah, it "changes things up" and that has some odd sort of value. But I am already looking forward to the day when things change up right back to complete stats. I use my baseball cards to understand the game, and the players.

Maybe you are reading this on a mobile OS. If so, pinch and zoom in on those underlines up there now. They report "3 Years" of MLB service. At first glance, that matches the 3 lines of stats - but one of those is for his trip back to AAA last year. The Home Run total, which doesn't match the tater numbers listed above it, reminds the card back reader that Schwarber came up in 2015. But for Topps, that is just "whatevs" to the card back writer who managed to dredge up the pointless fastest to 40 Homers stat. I don't begrudge the task of writing the back of a baseball card. But I just want to read the player's stats on the back - even if just the last five years. This card gives me a feeling I will be similarly disappointed in other random cards in the coming months; I just don't see any good reason to randomly delete a year of stats when all the other cards carry 5 lines of them. Sure, I could order Siri to bring up Baseball Reference for me. But that is why I buy baseball cards - to take a break from the screen, the screen.

But here I am on the screen and these pretty baseball cards are slipping away again. Here was a nice one, my First Card from My Team:

And the only Tiger in the pack. This year, I now need pretty much only 2 other Tiger cards - Miggy, and that new third baseman who's name I forget every time - so I need his new baseball card. My gut feeling is he will carry the Tigers effort in Series Two however. But those 3 cards are probably the only 3 cards that will have any relevance to the 2020 Detroit Tigers. Overall, I expect to find the lowest # of Tigers cards in S1/S2 in a long time as it's play-the-Rookies-time in Detroit, and that is hard to get excited about, and most of our promising Rookies will be up late in the year and most likely just a few will show up in Update. 

It is that bad in Motown - the likely starting roster was recently ranked #30 of 30 by some baseball ranker guy somewhere. I don't think the Tigers will finish 30th in MLB this year as they are so widely expected to finish last, and that will take most pressure off the players, for an a), and b) usually some other team will spectacularly implode quite surprisingly. And, c), the Royals are in the same boat with the Tigers, just in our own division, so there's that.

It was a big pack of cards to only have one Tiger - a "hanger box" of 72 cards. Those are my Go-To for collecting these days, although more and more Wal-Marts are offering single loose packs, the one and only Big Box store in my town does not. I would prefer the classic single pack of 10 cards or however Topps deigns to hand out for handing over two bucks these days, but my nearest Target is 65 miles away right now, unfortunately.

Picking up 72 cards at once does always guarantee plenty of baseball card pleasure. Topps can never screw up all 72 of them. This next one is now quite possibly my favorite card ever of this famous player:

However, the screen does not do this card justice, even though my new WiFi-enabled scanner is darn sweet, and will make scanning cards easier than ever. This card, though, has to be enjoyed In Hand, the way baseball cards are meant To Be. I like the use of the classic old-timey National League logo, rarely seen on cards outside of the special not-quite-accurate "All Star" blister pack sets that come out in June or so, for each league. The fairly pointless dab of lightening on the logos take a lot away from the 19th Century graphic design here; they vary in that effect on all of the other 31 logos on these cards. This set would be a lot better without that weird wash-out on the prime icons of the game.

Otherwise, this card is a little unremarkable. Clayton's arm just happens to also make this card look like a Panini effort (boo, hiss). So why is this a new fave of mine? I do like the darkness, darkness background. Is it a Night Card? Probably, but it might just also be an Indoor Card. Or both. Milwaukee, would be my guess for venue here.

When I reached this card in the pack, however, the feature I like about it jumped right out at me - this can only be seen in-hand, and I expect will disappear completely on any cards "slabbed" inside vanity plastic cases. The 2018 world of digital photography and high quality full color printing of bright glossy images is great - and on this card something happened to leave a glow around Mr. Kershaw here. It almost looks a photographic capture of his aura. My guess is it is some sort of reflection from the bright portion of the image, on either the original digital 'film' (memory card) the photographer used, or a similar such effect created by the printing process. But as soon as I had this card in my hand, I saw it, and I liked it.

Or, of course, when I next pull a copy of this card, which is inevitable when you attempt to build a set of Topps Baseball Cards by purchasing one of their packages with one's groceries, it will turn out that only this copy has that cool looking aura and all I have is a very minor printing error card. But then I will finally own a Clayton Kershaw 1/1.

So, yeah, I know, I type talk too much. There were some other cards I really liked in the 'pack' too:

One of those players who just always gets Good Cards. I'm glad he was on a World Series winning team before he had to live through a rebuild, like my team is doing now too. I have a feeling this one will make the cut of my eventual 9 best Salvador Perez cards. It also foreshadows another fave pull -

What a perfect way to show off the very nice "Ace 30" memorial patch for Paul Splittorff that the Royals wore last year (also way better, in-hand). Nice work, Topps. The Water Slide works very well with a Pitcher-in-Motion card, which are often good photos with lines revealing imminent motion.

EDIT, 11 months later: I am kind of glad no one noticed that terrible Error there. I even already have a nice card showing the "SPLITT" patch the Royals wore for Splittorff - some six years prior to this. Doh! That patch is for Yordano Ventura of course. On the other hand I am kinda bummed no one noticed it, either. Too long of a post, probably largely composed too late at night, ahh well, better luck, next time. I hope.

Another Pitcher In Action shot I found will also likely remain a 2018 favorite, and I only have 72 or so of the eventual 1,500 or so cards I will likely end up owning from this year's sets.

Eh, don't mind me, I'll just float here while I wait for the Umpire to call it a ball or strike. An excellent photo purchase. I think this card will likely end up on my Favorite 9 page for this set.

So I found plenty to like, and am all recovered from my anger at the back of the Schwarber card. The hoizontal cards are nice this year -

One thing I like about these two cards is that I think people will complain about them. I can't remember very many other oh-so-desired "RC"® logo cards being horizontal cards. 'They won't look right in my PSA holder' will be the charge. And since only PSA 10 RC qualify as actual desirable baseball cards to own (the other 99% of the set to be simply thrown away), these two cards will have a healthy population report, eventually. I did not pull the Rafael Devers RC that seems to be the most desired card in Series One, so far, but these two should not be far behind, considering how many teams wanted the Nationals and the Dodgers to offer these two players up for trade last year.

I also like that these two cards are not just floating torsos, which frequently wasted the horizontal format the last few years. I have long disliked the all-torso, all-the-time editing/cropping/zooming of recent sets. I really think someone else took over the mouse for this set, and we don't just see the players from the belt up, in a live action shot, but with all other traces of live baseball removed.

There remains the common complaint of what happened to the fans. I'm not sure this is deliberate by Topps. The clarity of the player image, which we like, I presume, might depend on shooting the photo and running it through the necessary software and then result in a loss of resolution in the background.

Or it might be deliberate, to help keep Topps out of compaints in the Social Media age, as with a fan on this card -

I'm certain this is not the first Smartphone Card. I'm also certain that fan is not snapping a picture right then, either. It might be kind of interesting to assemble all of the cards that have this kind of fan shown, but that would be straight depressing. As are pop-ups for the easily distressed Josh Reddick.

It wasn't all that long ago that we could see the In Action baseball players, and the fans, just as clearly:

In the years since 2013, seeing fans has been a moot point as the cards were so often so tight on just the player from the knees or belt up, like this new card:

But what is going on with that card? Did it escape from a Vladimir Putin kompromat operation? No, that is an example of this year's Topps Gold card. I know Topps has been making a set of Gold cards for a long long time now, and many collectors assemble it. So they have to print one, and they always will. And normally I like the Gold cards. But hopefully, this pitiful example of a parallel will help finally lead Topps back out of the Full Bleed Era. I have mostly been avoiding peeking at the other parallels this year, in hopes of wandering past a Toys R Us that is actually still open, and actually pulling one of the Pink, Black, or especially the Independence Day version, one of which did scroll past me on eBay the other day. Mostly though I don't plan on really taking a deliberate look at those until I am probably 3-4 hanger packs into Series Two, round about July. 

Of course it wouldn't be a pack of baseball cards any more without Inserts, for better or worse, mostly worse, in my opinion. I always like a few Insert sets in the Opening Day release, but Flagship inserts rarely fail to disappoint, me, at least:

This first one is like a cross between the various recent "Fire" cards, and some sort of homage to the work of Ralph Stedman. Ralph Stedman and photographically based baseball cards should probably not be mixed. I'll bet he could make some wicked cool Sketch Cards however, even though I don't really care for those anyway. As for re-using Insert ideas -

I swear I've seen more than a few "starry" graphical takes on the word "star" on a superfluously worthless baseball card. This latest retread of the idea seems to be missing a cat riding a Unicorn while shooting laser beams and eating a Taco, for hipsters to wear on Cat Shirt Friday. It's that Cheshire grin Bryce is sporting which tipped me off I guess.

Another standard component of Insert-ness is Topps mining it's past with retro issues. I like those. I like these. I figured they would fall one per hanger box, as per usual, and that was correct. (2 per Blaster, I would wager plenty on that being true). Let that Mullet Flag fly, deGrom - Bronson Arroyo won't be on any more baseball cards, so...

83 was the year where collecting started slowing down for the kid version of Base Set - the first year I did not complete the Base Set after a pretty good run from 78 onwards. So I have some guilt issues with this card and I won't be surprised if I pull the trigger on some random 29 card lots of 83s on eBay at some point this year. If I can ever escape from the boat anchor around my free time that is the reality of not being able to afford doing your own self-employment taxes, I might could hope to get back in to trading to help complete such a set. But that seems unlikely, especially given how much time I still spend working on really remote Forestry jobsites. But I love baseball cards, so that could still happen. Stay tuned.

The final insert, also surely to be found one per box, is from the "Topps Salute" set. The "Salute" part means whatever Topps wants it to mean. I liked most of the pulls I had from it last year, though not enough to get anywhere close to a desire to build the set. The Throwback Uniform cards which failed to show off the cool retro-ness features of the uniform turned me off the most, a common problem with Topps' frequently lazy attempts to make thematic baseball cards. I can do that in my sleep, buying random piles of "repack" cards and collating them in ways no baseball card set designer ever dreamed of. Why can't Topps?

Anyhow, my first Salute did feature one of those nice Alternate Uniforms I like so much on a baseball card - 

If this kid can hit the ball anywhere at Above Replacement levels, he is destined for baseball card greatness. I am still bummed that I pulled an autographed card in 2013 Pro Debut from one "Rock Shoulders", and he never made the Major Leagues.

I gotta say though, it was a little weird pulling two of those send-the-grandkids-to-college-with Rookie Cards of the same player, in the same 'pack'

It's all about that RC logo now, we all know that. There were strings of the things in this pack, 3-4 cards in a row, but I won't bore you with too many Bowman card escapees, like this 'Major Leaguer'

This kid should change the spelling of his first name to Rowdy and crack jokes about being all out of bubble gum. Or might need to wait a few years to pull that off.

One of the new Rooks is the clear front-runner for Best Socks In The Set though:

I was also mostly mollified, after my way-too-long-gone blog post previous to this one, that Topps didn't screw up the Rookie Cup this time. Those 83s are part of their "Continuity Program," whatever that is (the "silver packs"), but their real long-time continuity effort in the #1 set of baseball cards in America is their own Rookie Cup. And here one was in this pack:

And 'Future Stars' are back in the main set, after being relegated to the 87 inserts last year. I'm not excited or upset about the disintegration of the graphic stripes supporting the player and team name, just kind of whatevs about that myself. But on the Future Stars here, it seems like someone missed their Windows 95 Graphic Design software, as with those horrible "Perspectives" inserts a couple years back. We all know what happened to baseball and baseball cards in the 1990s. With those Perspectives cards, this Future Stars card, and the new wound-too-tight Gopher Ball MLB is using these days to make sure the utility infielder guy can hit Home Runs, too, I'm getting a little worried.

At least I got The Cup back. And now I have a new card to look for - a triple header RC Logo, Rookie Cup, and a Future Star. Does one exist? I don't think so, yet. But it could happen. My binder page is ready.

Despite that minor Future Star setback, I persisted with these cards, and with the scanner, all for you, Dear Reader. I pulled an OK pair of these cards - a nod to a long-time tradition of Duals, and another long-time tradition - these are again the Checklist cards. I pulled two of them on this go, am I detecting a theme here?

Are the Checklist cards all shot at First Base? I will be watching for the rest of these. I also enjoyed discovering an actual "Who's On First?" baseball card; perhaps it's been done before as it seems a perfect, and obvious, theme for a baseball card. But to really get this one right, it should have sported a photo of Rizzo, and, say Paul Goldschmidt. So close, Topps, so close.

I did find just one more theme running through this set, for now. In fact, I sort of used it for the title of this post. Early in the "on-line" breaking process we all peek at these days, I saw this image

(but no, I didn't luck pull that Super Short Print card, unfortunately), and I heard that it was indicative of the theme of the Short Print Photo Variations this year - "something going on with the hands". And that description does hold partially true, when I gaze at all the variants posted in yet another  Gallery-of-Cards-I-Will-Never-Own, where I conveniently downloaded that Trout to share with you.

But I think there is something going on in the mind of the Chief Photo Buyer For 2018 Topps Series One, regarding baseball players, and their hands:

I just kept being drawn to what the player is doing with their hand in these photos. These all make for a good baseball card. Did the Topps Curator do this consciously? Who knows. Am I just imagining this, and really most sets of 330-ish cards might have plenty of cards like this? The only way to find out, will be to buy more baseball cards.

Now, elsewhere online from the nice cozy baseball card blog-o-sphere, most of these cards would be total snoozers, except the Robles and Verdugo RCs, and then only if I had surgically placed them in pack fresh toploaders right in the parking lot of the Big Box store for a maximum chance at PSA 10ness. All most people care about in a 'break' is The Hits, man, did you get any Hits? It might be a good baseball card season, despited that dud Trumbo Opening Card, because I did hit something, at least, as the $ collectors might say -

which is a Short Print Photo Variation. Not terribly difficult to hit, 1-in-8 of these hanger boxes, but not as simple as with the deluge of these amongst my last baseball card purchases in 2017 Update, nor as insanely greatly difficult to pull as in 2016 Update, either. I also set aside Chris Sale cards, another one of those Good Card players, but this one won't make that cut. It is not even the first time Topps has shown him on an SP with a warm-up jacket and a towel - is Topps putting the juju on him, since he throws for an-enemy-of-New-York team? Are they trying to foreshadow an injury for this perennial Cy Young candidate? Is Chris' arm getting tired and sore? This card seems to say so. 

But maybe this card does too, and Topps is trying hard to be Fair and Balanced, unlike so many in "Media" these days -

I never like a card where I can see individual parts of a Pitcher's musculo-skeletal system; probably more noticeable, in-hand - you should collect these cards yourself, silly. And what is going on with Dellin's leg there? Does that light swooshy deal on the team logo get resentful of the white NY and commences to start growing on other parts of the card? Or did the intern in charge of blurring out the fans in every photo have a slight mouse accident here? Betances has been a workhorse the last many years running, as has Sale...what will 2018 hold for them? Sometimes, my baseball cards are pretty smart.

Other times, Series One is a nod to the past, not the future. As with probably a sunset card for Joey Bats this go-round, and probably others I have yet to discover. I also try, and frequently fail, to remember what was my Last Card of my first baseball card purchase of the year. This one, I think I will remember. I like this player, and I like baseball cards, and I like blogging, and I like all of y'alls, and I will be back. And this, was just about the perfect Last Card in the mini box of Baseball Cards, for this Baseball Card Season Opener

Bad news in the Base Set

Hello there, nice to 'see' you. I am fine and still collecting baseball cards. Not much actual news for me; it is still hard to keep up with cards and particularly, blogging, while I travel around for Forestry work all the time. But I figured right now at another one of the very peaks of Aaron Judge mania would be a good time to check in with y'all.

I am, however, pretty disappointed with some new baseball cards I just purchased.

Ever since the 1960 Topps Baseball card set, Topps has seemed very proud of their "All-Star Rookie" teams, originally "selected by the youth of America." I don't have a 1960 Topps All-Star Rookie Cup card to show you unfortunately, though I hope to some day as I collect such cards. But I was happy to find this in a pack of cards I purchased in 2008:

Which is a great representation of the 1960 cards, issued as an insert set in 2008, and one of the rare insert sets I will be collecting to completion. There were 50 years to celebrate in 2008 because the 1960 cards actually honor the performance of the Rookies in the 1959 season. This can always cause a little confusion when discussing Topps All-Star Rookies.

They even used the Rookie Cup to run a contest that year:

I have always enjoyed collecting these cards. Usually falling as a player's second card in the "flagship" Topps set, they aren't expensive in this Rookie Card driven Hobby. So I collect them a bit randomly; I found this one in a re-pack product at the $1 store just a few months ago -

Eventually, I hope to assemble the whole "team" for each year, like this:

(with apologies to Jose Iglesias and Wil Myers, as 11 cards don't fit; a bit of a vexing problem for storing these cards)

There have been gaps in the history of placing the Cup on the cards over the years, but if I recall my web references read just a few minutes ago, it has been a constant on the cards since 1987.

This year started off the same, with 2 cards featuring the Cup on the very first 'page' of Series One (Corey Seager and Gary Sanchez), and also one on the last page -

But after the Series One release, things started to change:

At first one might think this was a conscious decision, to just use the Rookie Cup in the regular set, the "Flagship" (I am not a big fan of that term). But that wouldn't make a lot of sense, to remove the Cup from a cheap set still theoretically aimed at "the youth of America." Normally, the Cup is part of Opening Day, and other products using the base cards, like this one - 

(From the 2016 "Holiday Set")

I like these 'double dip' cards for a player that was called up and played like gangbusters before Topps could even issue an RC logo card - probably another new small specialty collection I will chase and 'binder up' together. I don't think there are very many such cards.

The Opening Day set of course gives you a 'sneak peak' at the cards still to appear in Series 2. Sometimes these are unique cards with images all of their own; the Gary Sanchez Rookie in 2016 is a good example of one that may become slightly sought after, as it was his first true pack-issued RC I believe, with an image that varies from his Series 2 card (though only in the zoom/crop). Generally however Opening Day cards are almost completely ignored by $$$-obsessed collectors.

Still, it is nice to get an early look at all the stars of the game, during Spring Training, 3 months before Series 2 is released, like this very exciting young player:

And this is where I believe a problem crept into the production of my brand new Topps 2017 Series 2 Baseball Cards:

Because back in January or so, the full 2016 Topps MLB All-Star Rookie Team was announced as:

C – Gary Sanchez NYY

1B – Tommy Joseph PHI
2B – Ryan Schimpf SDP
3B – Alex Bregman HOU
SS – Corey Seager LAD
OF – Trea Turner WAS
OF – Nomar Mazara TEX
OF – Tyler Naquin CLE
LHP – Julio Urias LAD
RHP – Kenta Maeda LAD
RP – Seung Hwan Oh STL

And now we are left with a 2017 Topps Baseball Card team of just 5 of the 11 All-Star Rookies, in terms of being the oh-so-desirable "on card".

In the grand scheme of things, this is only a minor complaint of course. But then anything about baseball cards is basically completely unimportant, and a big reason I had to suspend blogging about baseball cards, temporarily.

And there will always be errors in the production of a set of over 1,000 cards now, across Series 1, Series 2, and Update, like this card:

Aviles was traded, at a level just barely above a DFA transaction, to the Braves last --- August! 2016! On the back of this card it says "ACQ: TRADE WITH TIGERS 8-16-16" - quite a neat trick, acquiring a player by trading with yourself. I know Topps never pays much attention to the Detroit Tigers and I really wish they would give us some new Alan Trammell or Kirk Gibson cards in the inserts and subsets instead of yet another inevitable round of Kaline/Verlander/Cabrera. Though it is not really Topps' fault that few of the Tigers' personnel decisions have been working out lately and no one really wants cards of scrubs/commons aging out of the game. Like Mike Aviles.

Such small errors are to be expected I guess, and the New York Mets will always get more Topps Love than any other team too, most likely.

Right now though, Topps is making a lot of money. They have finally, and not entirely unpredictably, moved into the memorabilia market as direct sellers of individual cards, rather than just issuing them as parts of cases and boxes. Selling autographed, limited edition Topps Now cards directly to collectors has got to be extremely profitable. And I am very happy for Topps, because what is good for Topps is good for me and my collections of those cheap "low end" baseball cards most collectors completely ignore. 

And this is also a time when a base card produced in, who knows, an edition of a few 100,000 or more, issued just five months ago, can sell for $120 (2017 Aaron Judge Series One Rookie, graded to PSA 10 - sold last night after the 'Derby). 

So baseball cards are still fun for the people who derive their enjoyment from buying a card for 25 cents and watching it grow in value. I am also very happy for those types of collectors, because again what is good for people who collect 'financially', let's say, is also good for me.

I just hope with all this money being made, the ultimate cost of the "worthless" cards I actually keep and enjoy can remain low. I doubt there will be very much 2017 product on the discount shelf next year.

And more importantly, that certain key details can be covered correctly. Perhaps there is still time to do so in the Update set, which should have plenty of room amidst all the padding in that product.

It's a small world, after all, and I can continue to daydream that some of the small things can still be delivered, for the small collectors, like me.

Phoning It In #4

I started to like an insert set this year; this surprised me quite a bit.

I mentioned it when I pulled the first card, featuring Gregory Polanco. There was a certain painterly effect to the image on the card.

Everything gets all soft and fuzzy, rather than harshly pixelated. Almost like the card is hand-colored.

I also liked the neat things I found on some of the cards, such as the guy in the crowd on that card, taking a cell-phone picture of the photographer.

Or this card, that I will be keeping in a mini-collection:

I like cards that reveal that the player wears a Cross. I'm not particularly religious in that I don't go to Church, but I remember and use the things I learned there when I was younger, and I like that Topps now uses images that reveal a player's Faith. I think this is about the 5th such card that I have found.

And in general, I just like the total image result:

Even when there isn't a blurry crowd painted in behind the player by the digital effect selected at Topps HQ. The player image is still soft, and somehow more likable and humanizing.

There are 30 of these cards I thought, 3 cards for each of ten players, though not in every case. Leave it to Topps to mess up a simple format and cause OCD itch in their customers (something I always like, actually). And it turns out there are in total 90 of them, as these appeared in Series 1, Series 2, and Update. I think I would have liked them more if each player got one card in each Series, as the year went along.

It wasn't until I bought the Hobby Box of Update and had a bunch of these that I started to appreciate them. I didn't rip a lot of regular Topps in 2014.

I even thought, hmm, inserts from S1/S2/Update are pretty easy to come by. Maybe I'll go for a set of these and enjoy a few binder pages of them in the future.

Then I realized I had the "complete set" of one of the players - Gregory Polanco. I noted how the text on the backs of many of these is so rather pointless when I bought my first pack of Update this year. Err, last year. A big highlight in a single-A game. Really?

But I won't be worrying about the filler type card back texts on these, and that's not because I decided to keep them doubled up in the binder pages, a decision I make on a checklist-by-checklist basis.

Looking at the Polanco cards all together, I started thinking...

...I think I saw that same basic pose before. In this very same checklist even, of this very same player.

At least the third of these cards was different.

And there's one of those nifty Camo logos Topps seems to ever more love to use on their baseball cards. But I started thinking, I've seen another card just recently with the Pirates black uniform and the Camo-block-P:

And out the window went the idea of building 90 of these cards. I'm not sure I've noticed Topps repeating images right inside the same Master Checklist of a single product release before.

Whenever I win the lottery of Free Time to sort all my baseball cards, these inserts will be reduced to my favorite 9 on a single page, rather than 90.

I still like the fronts. It could have been a contender.

A One and Done

Well you don't see cards like this one much any more...

Another Topps RC of some player you've never heard of, in the Update set? Yeah, yeah, I know, you see those all the time.

But seriously, unless you are pretty deep into following the Yankees, or possibly the Brewers, I'd be willing to wager you've never heard of Zelous Wheeler.

And that is probably true even if you were a dedicated prospector who has complete sets of every Bowman product line going back to 2007, when Wheeler was drafted in the 19th round by the Brewers.

Because ole 'Zel has never had a baseball card before. But then, hitting a Home Run in your second ever MLB At Bat can probably get you one.

Unfortunately, despite those two truly illustrious accomplishments - I mean really, don't YOU truly wish you had hit a Home Run in the Major Leagues and had your very own authentic Topps baseball card? - Wheeler went on to hit just .193 across 57 At Bats for the Yankees over the second half of the season.

And none of this even makes for all that interesting of a baseball card, I know. Although becoming one of the only 750 people on an MLB 25 man roster on any given day of the season is truly an achievement in life, I'm not that into the Yankees or the trivia answers about their ever more cursed corner position lately to like this card as much as I now do. Though I also like looking at it and thinking the guy straight up looks like a linebacker in football and having the back of the card confirm that to be true for me.

But I like it the most because there will probably never be another Zelous Wheeler baseball card. A true One and Done.

Perhaps one might fall out of a bag of potato chips somewhere in Japan next season, because that's where Wheeler will be playing as his contract was somehow sold by the Yankees to the Japanese team. (I have no idea how that process still works in the game - sounds so 1950s). I wouldn't count that one as a Two and Done though.

I never thought I would find another One and Done card in a pack of Topps baseball cards, when for so many players these days, an actual baseball card of them actually playing Major League Baseball is almost an after-thought for many collectors, and a player generally has quite an oeuvre of cards by the time they see their first day in The Show. Sometimes I wonder if there are collectors who don't even own any true MLB cards and I realize, yes, there probably is.

There is one other very intriguing element to this card though:

I really can't find any reference to the Yankees appearing with a gold logo this year. I would have though UniWatch would be on the case here. Topps got this image from MLB I think, or MLB purchased it from the same photographer or agency that Topps did; here is his MLB bio pic:

 

Though I had hoped to keep this post all thematically correct with just one image, I had to share this odd NY logo with you.

Along the way of figuring out just who this player is (was), I also ran across this odd fact - did you know that Topps issued a baseball card for Mario Cuomo? That's a link to a blog post on that, if you can't quite see the hyperlink color there.

So there goes the theme again - two subjects in one post. Ahh well, that's what happens when you stare at baseball cards too long.