Was that 2020 Baseball Cards on that shelf there?

Happy post-Opening Day! It was so great to be absorbing baseball action that "counts" -- and both my teams won their first game. There's always this year!

I did have one major downer though - for the first time I can ever recall in my entire life, I could not purchase a pack of baseball cards on Opening Day. I think I will always have trouble getting used to that fact; though I can "wrap my mind around" all the causes, that simple thing is just one that particularly keeps me wondering a certain question. Am I just about to wake up now?

Maybe it is time for another deep absorption of Richard Linklater's masterpiece movie "Waking Life," I dunno. But before I wake up, I have been wanting to share the baseball cards I discovered inside this not-so-great dream of the past year. And it is always way past time for me to deal with those ever-growing stacks of baseball cards. Later on tonight when the dulcet tones of Jon Miller start describing a new Giants season for me, I think I might finally put some 1986 Topps into some binder pages. And maybe keep those near a scanner, for y'all.

But before I enjoy some constructing of a binder full of my baseball card youth, or get on with having fun with brand new baseball cards, let's see what I could far too rarely find on the shelves last year - 2020 Baseball Cards:

Most Now What?

This appeared on the one 'blaster' I was able to purchase of Big League. I don't know why but I like this pleasing purple border, a color with almost no connection to most of MLB, and despite it's flirting with a pastel level of tint. But it is quite a happy card of Miggy and I quite look forward to rescuing it from it's cardboard panel to hang out with the rest of my Miggy cards.

But - I want this card cut out of here, perfectly. The best technique or equipment for this is a bit of a taboo subject in baseball cards, where the thought of a card actually worth money possibly being "trimmed" - well that's just a collecting rabbit hole of thought and controversy I don't really have to consider much, because I have no plans to ever buy any expensive baseball cards. (Though I do really want a-bit-less-than-gem copy of Miggy's first not-Chrome Topps card).

I know I will eventually have to man up and just cut this with a pair of scissors. But I also know I won't get the dotted line and the purple boundary just exactly perfect and straight. So this panel will probably kick around my card desk for a while to come. If Topps hadn't put those unnecessary instructions on there, the whole thing would look quite nice, like a card-within-a-card with a pleasant colorful bottom border. Dilemmas, dilemmas.

First Favorite Insert Run

I quite liked this card when I first pulled it, or a similar one. The simple attention-paid detail of making the left and bottom of the image a staid yellow while the opposite sides are shaded gives a nice 2D illusion of a picture in a 3D frame. Previous takes on Turkey Red omitted that tiny thing, I believe. Meanwhile the background is simple but artsy illustration. Nice.

But eventually I pulled this card -

And I started to think hey, wait. Those nifty illustrations are going to repeat now. I highly doubt the original Turkey Red illustrators ever did that - because they almost surely couldn't. But Topps can:

Which kind of really just puts it in your face that these cards are just specially digitized photographs. Because what 100 years ago Illustrator would show off a Spring Training complex's "Batter's Eye" wall construction as a backdrop for a famous baseball player? (And I only ever pulled the one horizontal - I need 9 horizontals, Topps, to really enjoy them correctly - on a binder page.) Although one would have to reach that conclusion about all the cards if you really thought about it, I would rather the card leave me the illusion of illustration, not just more action photography.

Even though that kind of works well too -

Until you pull another player's card with that same background, cheapening both of them when in close proximity to each other. At one time I wanted to build maybe one of the sets of these from S1, S2, or Update but that desire waned as my little stack of them very slowly grew. I ended up with a couple dozen of them and should be able to distill that down to just a single page of Like.

Favorite Horizontal

OK I confess I'm not positive this will be my totally favorite #1 horizontal card from 2020. But I do know this card will end up on a page with 8 compatriots as a keepsake for 2020 Topps Baseball for me. The set did offer up a lot of nice horizontals.

On that card, I like (as usual) the whole flow of the image working with the card design. Bonus features include a bunch of dedicated fans all powder blued up, and the way Carpenter is pushing off from first base with his foot. Making this sort of a contender for top base running card, but I had to disqualify it because no one actually runs after hitting a Home Run. But powder blue does look good on the base paths:

Best Base-Running Card Runner-Up

That's the way to do it. Powder blue, dirt, Action! I quite liked Big League this year, another product I would have collected more of, if I could without buying from an extra layer of middle man rather than in a store. As great as that card is though, I found another in Big League I liked better:

Best Base-Running Card

I can't recall owning any other baseball cards quite like this one, where Brendan looks to have just rounded First and is focused on gauging a defender's likelihood of throwing him out. Or it could be a unique lead-off stance, but I don't think so. This would make a perfect In Action card in '21 Heritage, if Brendan Rodgers had a bit more checklist pull, me thinks. But I have no real ability to conceive of anything about Brendan Rodgers, so I guess I better get around to reading the back of this card before it gets a coveted binder page slot for all eternity. 

Best Fielding Card Runner-Up

Here again I couldn't pick just one. Though this card is quite grey, the overall bright sunshine makes you forget that, and this photo is just too good to worry about card design around it.

Best Fielding Card

For once the image complements the design.

Most Same As It Ever Was Fielding Card

The Curious Case of Nicholas Castellanos continues; Topps just seems to mock one of the most classic examples (to the tune of $16 Million a year for Nick) of The Bat's Worth It by reminding us all to look up Casty's latest dWAR in a smaller ballpark. Maybe Topps is giving me a hint, dunno. I prefer to read baseball cards as a first choice, not websites -- though one of those informed me today that Winker's "D" is questionable, too. Humph.

Best Tigers Card

I was unable to get many Detroit Tigers cards this past year. I wasn't able to get very many baseball cards at all, and when you are drafting first in MLB every other year, your team isn't getting very many Topps baseball cards to start with. So I know I won't have the energy to do a post on the Tigers cards of 2020. I managed to turn up a majority of the Tigers issued in Series One, Two, and Update though not all of them. I am pretty sure I have all of the ones with much chance to play for the Tigers in '22 and '23, and if not by some miracle I might or might not track them down some day. 

2020 was tough enough without spending any extra time pondering a team playing for nothing, in my opinion. Many very young players appeared in the starting 9, as required to rebuild a Major League baseball club. But 2020 results were clearly not going to "count" for much in terms of making long-term decisions, as the challenging personal environment that 2020 was for all human beings has to make for an automatic pass on baseball results. Poor results could trace to much more than a lack of the very best athletic skills needed to stay on an MLB roster while good results could trace to the unique silent stadium environment, perhaps. Though I think as a team sport 2020 results were fully valid as all teams faced the same challenges, on an individual player level 2020 has to be a bit of a Mulligan if needed in terms of signing contracts, trades, etc. -- in my opinion. And meanwhile the players not ready to place on the 40 Man roster weren't even playing, further devaluing 2020 MLB Tigers games as at least a way to consider how much future to give one of the young players. About the standard calculus - is there a better replacement? - In 2020, the Tigers couldn't even begin to guess, until Spring Training 2021.

So a normal fan-like following of the Tigers quickly felt rather pointless last year as no long-term roster implications were all that much at stake. Baseball cards couldn't even help much.

And, basically, the Tigers card above really is the best one I pulled in 2020, though I can show off one other slightly fun one, from the Tigers Opening Day Starter:

Best Tigers Socks

Best Socks

He still sports multiple flair, too, with a continued use of those team logo 'eye blacks.' They say the kids today want to see more uniform excitement. I know Topps will be into that idea.

Best Night Card

Thanks as always to Night Owl for pointing out the always continuing occasional use of these cards for a game played largely at night, though a fair bit less often depicted on cardboard. This is another largely grey card due again to the road uniform, but captures my attention anyways. And who can't root for a guy named Elvis?

Best Baseball Name

Worst Baseball Name

Complete with print line. Well played Topps, well played. Sorry, Aaron.

Best Football Name

2021 Update will supply a good portion of this post, as that was probably the product I was able to purchase the most of. I never thought Heritage would disappear from shelves as fast as it did, for one.

Anyhow, I think the much maligned Update set will develop a cult-like following starting ten years from now, due to all the random stuff going on in it. Will I see these dudes in more 2020s Topps Baseball sets? One can only hope.

Best Shohei Ohtani Card

As with Ohtani, a pass on 2020 might work out well for baseball card fans if McKay can return in 2021 and really become a Pitching Designated Hitter. What better team than the Rays to have a player like this; it sure seems like they should somehow be able to exploit their Opener© technique especially well with McKay.

But also as with Ohtani, seeing P/DH on the 2 player's cards just makes me wonder - why doesn't a National League team get a hold of a P/DH and put them in the bullpen to really get some double positives with late game line-up moves? Alas, unless Ohtani's new very-team-friendly 2 year extension makes him a desired trade target for a NL team at the trade deadline (my big hope for the 2021 season), we will likely never see what might have been with this concept in no-DH play where one would think it would be the most exciting. Because it does look like this will be the very last year of Pitchers @ the plate in pro baseball. 

Goofiest Parallel

It has been a minute since Topps pulled this one out of their bag of tricks. Though I have some naturally vivid memories of other blazing orange parallels they have created and do collect them, this year's go wasn't quite wacky enough for me. The clean basic design of Big League works too well with the bright orange border, I think. Without much color clash with the design, this colorful uniform and outfield wall is probably the weirdest color salad card of the year and one I will keep. But the rest of these just couldn't crack the so-bad-it's-good bar I will be looking at in a 2021 post soon.

Favorite Parallel

These are so fun, in-hand. (The basic "Prism" parallel). Another 2020 loss that I could only acquire 2 of them from packs. I've already posted the other one, but they are also such a fun scan, so here we go, again

Most Mysterious Desired Insert

I think I saw one more of these on a blog post, and I think I might have one more of these that I can't find again. This is from 2020 Opening Day, which otherwise offered little in terms of unique photos, that I can recall from what seems like far more than just one year ago.

Probably the craziest baseball card news of the ongoing "cardmageddon" is that 2021 Opening Day won't even be delivered to retail stores. The most 'low end' cheap baseball card set supposedly constructed and priced for young collectors to enjoy baseball cards, too - won't even be delivered to retail stores. 2021 Opening Day cards do exist - but were all sold in boxes and cases to breakers and the occasional dedicated collector wanting just a box or two to open with their kids. Demand for cheap retail baseball cards is so high that Topps can't even deliver cheap retail baseball cards to retail stores. Let that sink in.

That card's probably small checklist mates are still a mystery to me because I haven't bothered to look them up on my usual source for such a question and probable insert set collection effort - COMC. And that's because COMC can't even deliver baseball cards to collectors right now all that much better than Topps is able to place them in stores. A package of mostly cheap, nearly value-less baseball cards I requested from them is now a month late on an original 3 month shipping estimate. Which in turn thoroughly sapped motivation to work on my 2013 set blog, as so many cards for that ongoing collection are purchased, but not actually available to me right now.

Meanwhile the collection of baseball cards valued in $20 and $100 bills has once again shouldered aside collecting cheap baseball cards as COMC continues to sell and ship baseball cards on eBay every single day, which feels like them flipping a giant middle finger to their existing customers by instead catering to new customers. Or, they are financially circling the drain and can't admit it to anyone. We all know 2020 and now 2021 is 'interesting times' for all businesses, but my usual source of cheap cards seems to be on shaky ground. And I won't/can't buy fun Opening Day inserts like the above card, one at a time, from eBay... can I wake up now?

Favorite Insert Card

I wish I could write Favorite Insert Checklist, but I also have my doubts I will ever be able to collect these beyond a really small stack of them that would not look good in a just-nine single binder page. These would probably look great together but another recent Topps baseball cards development is more insert sets that are hard to pull - something both good and bad. This particular card, though, will look great on a page of Carlton Fisk cards.

Most Hated Card

I quite like Xander Bogaerts. In any other decade he would be a much bigger star. But when MLB is so Home Run Derby all day, every day, he can't stand out for solid though routine baseball offense and great defense when so many of his fellow Shortstops just simply hit more dingers than he does.

But that's not why I hate his 2020 Heritage card, which traces back to well over a decade of Red Sox cards shot in this exact spot. Which both illustrates a basic Topps laziness, and the way they don't have to think about using interesting photos when such a solid majority of their customers only care about the print run of a given card, not the actual content.

And yes, I already know that 2021 Heritage will supply an example of Most Hated Card for me this year, too.

Best 'Auto'

I like 'facsimile' signatures. Most collectors either don't care for them, or don't notice them at all as just complained about, particularly when they often disappear into the photography anyway, as with the previous card.

That Musgrove card is also the Best Shoulder Patch Card.

Happiest Card Runner-Up

Smiles remain scarce on a majority of baseball cards, so a good one always stands out, and a great smile here seems to be making Dominic an increasingly anticipated player in New York. However the times we are living in with the pandemic make me suspect smiles will be the scarcest ever on 2021 'action' cards and 2022 Spring Training portrait cards.

Happiest Baseball Card

Of course it is probably the unique circumstances of 2020 that led to a plethora of Spring Training portrait cards sneaking into the Topps Baseball set this year despite the official theme of all live MLB action photos, all the time. So that card makes me happy to just see some diversity in the set again, as that random head shot I picked for my 2019 Card of the Year is almost certainly not going to be an ongoing stylistic photo option in the Topps Baseball set. Which will likely be the case with this breath of diverse fresh air in the set on cards like that one.

Best Horizontal Card Runner-Up

This could be a fine selection for Best Horizontal but we all knew it was coming. Still a happy 'pull' from a pack to see Topps got this one right with a Yankees Catcher - though they could have doubled down and done this on the Will Smith card, too.

Most Consistent Topps Error

A bit of a debacle in Topps Baseball Series One was the lack of any Texas Rangers cards, save one. Which felt like something that could have just as easily happened to my team given their similar dearth of famous baseball players that every kid on the block wants a card from. A bit more telling was that the only Rangers card Topps could remember to print on the first half of the checklist was a Rookie Card.

And then when Series Two appeared and all the other Rangers cards had a special inaugural season emblem in some sort of make-up effort by Topps .... naturally Topps managed to go right back to minor Texas Rangers card errors with Solak's Rookie Debut card, which are always basically superfluous cards anyway.

Most Consistent Batting Stance

See, he really does smile out at the opposing pitcher. Smiles during play are even more rare on live action baseball cards than on posed cards. I wonder what happens if he faces this particular Pitcher -

Would they each then smile harder at each other? A pity my baseball cards will never be able to answer that one.

Best '75 Topps Homage, Lefty - Tie

Best '75 Topps Homage, Lefty - Tie

Best '75 Topps Homage, Righty

Always a fan of these. Someday I will assemble them to determine the most authentic/closest one.

Best Look-In Card

Don't always see too many of these. This one will join the Carpenter card on a Best-of-20 Horizontals page. It probably helps this card a lot that Tanaka looks to be pitching in Boston, making it easy to forget the road grey + grey card combo. Lotsa times, that was impossible...

Greyest Card

Whitest Card

Makin' baseball cards is so easy it's like falling off a bike, right? This card would definitely make it past my so-bad-is-good threshold.

Favorite Cameo

There are quite possibly other, greater 2020 "Cameo" cards than this one. But I am selecting keeper cards from a quantity of 2020 baseball cards probably not greater than the # of entries on a Topps Baseball set checklist. And I always like a clear view of an Ump on a card. I haven't tracked down which Umpires worked the 2004 All-Star Game, but I probably will before this card gets sealed into a binder page.

Best Cap

The Rays are always delighting me with the Ray appearing on a baseball card, and with uniform choices in general. I can't recall ever seeing this particular cap before, and hope to see it some more, and maybe on more of a close-up. And maybe on another player as Snell is not a favorite.

I Can't Quite Believe It, Either

This is like an Anti-Base Running card. Because for one - where is the base? And this is neither a glove first nor a bat first player. Full Stop.

Topps' Favorite Hall of Famer This Year?

I guess when this is the broadcaster you hear most @ the office...you get 2 cards in Archives.

Favorite Hall of Famer Card

Most Appropriate Re-Pack Pull

:(

Longest Rookie Card Parade

In case you were wondering where all the A's Rookie Card cards were hiding.

I guess Oakland is re-building, again. 

Favorite Rookie Card

Though I quite like Arozarena's Topps Chrome Rookie Card where Topps has the Cardinals trading with themselves, this card is tough to beat with that bedazzling Spring Training uni the Rays have, one I have also never seen before on cardboard. Live long and prosper, Randy.

Most Irritating Card

I won't miss this guy. And I don't think he deserved a tip-o-the-cap card, either.

Laziest Card Back Effort

I keep finding this on Team Card card backs. If you are squinting too much to make out what's above the red underline, it's "No Qualifier." Topps makes so many baseball cards, they can't be bothered to just look up which Brewers pitcher might have led the team despite not producing one with enough innings for the official MLB rankings of ERA. And this is on a card produced before the crazy 2020 season - which has this phrase all over the 2021 card backs.

Most Perplexing Pack

I pulled these two cards sequentially. Pretty much every baseball fan would wish Brinson could work out for the Marlins, and their poor fans could see something from trading away a future MVP. No one likes seeing a team deliberately torn apart like that. But it's just not working out, Topps. Hope springs eternal, I guess.

Best Team Logo / Best Free Agent Card

Only Free Agent card? Ever?

This card came about because The Great Bartolo was the current Active Leader in Wins last year, on a slight technicality - he hadn't officially retired, yet. And I believe I heard he is pitching in the Mexican League this year. So perhaps this won't be his last active piece of cardboard. But if it is, this card makes a nice capstone to a long and winding career.

Best Rain Card

I'm not sure yet if I will keep this with a very few other rainy cards ever made, or with some other good Brock Holt cards, or on a page of Best 2020 Horizontals. Probably, I just need more copies of this one.

Best Diagonal Card

Even the sideburns are on a diagonal!

And - most prescient card of the next Topps design?

Most Pandemic Prescient Card

Best Dual

I can't say I really root for either of these players. But a fun baseball card is a fun baseball card.

Best Throwback Uniform

Kluszewski Lives!

And now it's time for 

The 2020 Card of the Year

When I first saw this one I immediately thought it should be an entry in my hardly-ever posted How Not To Do It theme. I mean, this card has everything going wrong. Bryant is not looking at the ball. His glove is facing the wrong way. And it's the All-Star Game - so, nobody cares. Personally, I really liked those years of the game where the winning League got home field for the World Series. But I was in the minority on that.

Seems fitting that I am finishing up this post on news that MLB has now dragged the All-Star Game into our country's politics, too. Baseball, and baseball cards, were a welcome relief from the news this past year. I have to wonder how much Baseball will be discussed on News programs, now.

Overall, this card from one of the most non-sensical sets of baseball cards I can recall just seems perfectly emblematic of that set, and the year 2020 in general. Let's hope for a more exciting Card of the Year, next year. Or this year, or, whatever year it is. I forget.

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:

Is that 2021 Baseball Cards there on that shelf?

It was, it was!

Hello again everybody, I have sure missed you. Each year from around the time that Topps reveals the design of the next year's main Topps Baseball baseball card, I pretty much stop reading the baseball card blogs, and begin being very careful about everything "baseball card" I do elsewhere online. As each year I still want to enjoy one of my life's simplest pleasures: opening a pack of brand new baseball cards without knowing what they will look like in advance. Which is becoming a fairly not so simple pleasure any more as our lives become increasingly digital.

Nevertheless I persist in my old-timey ways where I can, and mostly avoided seeing the new Topps Baseball design until I was finally able to pick up some cards recently. I would prefer to buy a single loose pack, but that is not always simple and was basically impossible during our ongoing baseball card mania. So I considered myself lucky to find one blaster of 2021 Series One just laying on a shelf in my local Big Box store, with nary a price sticker in sight (weird). Of course that gave me a delightful 100-ish brand new baseball cards to absorb, but I will just post the whole of the first "pack" from inside the blaster. Let's go to the tape:

Whoop there it is! The big 7-0 I guess.

And this is why I buy Topps Baseball cards basically most every chance I get. Here I find a card of a player for a division rival to my favorite team, that I have never heard of before ripping this pack. Which probably traces to the absurdly extreme difficulties I had last summer in procuring any 2020 Series Two, where Danny Mendick's Rookie Card appeared, unbeknownst to me after procuring only maybe 100 of the 2020 S2 cards.

Another year, another brand new Topps Baseball design. I think I will rate this one "so close," Topps, so close. I quite like diagonal design elements to a baseball card; they frequently contribute to the flow of captured motion in the photograph. This will vary considerably from card to card with this design, as we shall see.

The obvious glaring problem here though is the teeny tiny player name, which is a rather large (small) mistake, in my opinion. That is then compounded by the font choice, which doesn't work well in the ALL CAPS version, and I suspect it is also ITALICS but I just don't have the energy, or the eyesight, to really figure that out. The player's name is just too darn hard to read, period.

I am also not a fan of the way life in 2021 America is so Pastel. I use that word in reference to the tint or brightness of a color. Most bright colors are frowned upon in our society any more; our country is supposedly the land of the free, where individuality reigns supreme. Of course we can all choose a bright color for a piece of clothing or any object we own, but few people do. One place you don't see toned down pastel colors is in Major League Baseball, where bright primary colors seem to largely hold on, somehow. But here on this brand new Topps Baseball card, we have that odd bit of pale pink appended on to the main graphic element, but in such a small amount that it does almost nothing.

Ahh well, there are good things about this design too, like the return of a full border to the Topps Baseball set after many years in the full bleed jungle. Though here again I like the concept, but not the execution. Whoever OK'd the full border refused to just stop there though. This border has so many different little things going on I'm not sure I could count them all. I'm not a professionally trained Graphic Designer, I just play one on my little baseball card blog. But I do know the design probably violates the Prime Directive of Design: Keep it simple, stupid. I did not pull any color border parallels in this first blaster purchase, but I have seen some, and that is where all the random things going on all around every edge of the image really start popping out at you and cluttering everything up. Why, Topps why?

The final piece of most Topps Baseball designs is the bit where Topps let's you know who made this baseball card: Topps. I do quite like the foil 70 Topps logo with more diagonal goodness and also it's tactile feel from being embossed on each card.

Overall, I know this design will grow on me over time, as all Topps Baseball designs do. But I also suspect I won't really want to look at 74 binder pages of nothing but this design, either. It coulda been a contender for being full set binder worthy with just a few small tweaks to the basic concepts, but 1 Whitehall St. never rings me up for approval in advance with these things.

OK then, let's check the back:

More grey again this year, but most importantly - full stats. Many, but not all, of the random things happening around the border of the image on the front of the card return for a still somewhat overly busy look. The player name is again hard to read and the team name is even more illegible, though that isn't all that needed since we will always have a nice professionally designed team logo with standard primary colors to tell us the team name quickly and easily anyway. The player position though - it's on the back of the card, but so tiny as to be an after-thought, really. 

Now I did cheat on y'all just a little bit and bought a few more of these brand new Topps Baseball cards, where I pulled another Blue Jays card:

I scanned this card back for a couple reasons - check out the pink design element on this Santiago Espinal card vs the purple look to the same element on the Shoemaker card. This tells me that production will vary on these cards quite a bit; not a surprise in a year with a big production increase and probably an extra layer of challenge for the printers, in this year of the virus.

The back of the Espinal card is notable for something else, as it has that coveted Rookie Card logo on the front. The stats on the back, though, are finally the stats from Espinal's first games in the Majors last year. Though most people know that Mike Trout only hit .220 during his first appearances in MLB in 2011 and well understand that "cup of coffee" type stats don't really mean all that much (unless, perhaps, they are very, very good), I would still rather read these MLB stats than a useless compilation of an RC logo card player's stats in the minor league's the previous year. Since there were no minor league games last year, Topps had little choice in this. But I hope this trend of using MLB stats even on an RC logo card, when MLB stats do exist for a player, will continue in future sets.

OK, ok, you there in the back, wake UP! Here are some more of them baseball cards you clicked over here to look at:

I pulled a Mike Clevenger card (or is it Mike Clevinger? if only my baseball card could show me) in my first pack last year, and the year before that, too. This one is much better than the 2020 all-grey-all-the-time card, but not as good as the definitively informational 2019 card.

One of the tangential losses to the virus in the 2020 season was fans never had their chance to boo the Astros. On this card, it looks like that might have been a hazardous choice by the fans in the stands, though they would have all that new netting to protect them. Is that a chip there on Bregman's shoulder? I dunno, but if so, it was well earned.

The "Future Stars" designation will continue, a not all that long running Topps tradition which is a bit of a sophomore selection for promising young players akin to the even longer Topps tradition of the Rookie Cup team logo. I always like these, mostly so I can set them aside and snicker at the selections five years later. And of course other times, this Topps anointment arrives for players like Bo Jackson, so - I likes it.

Has anyone ever tried to rank which MLB team is the most sartorially challenged across their years of existence? Is there any doubt that San Diego would "win" such a contest?

It appears we have a bit of a Pitcher Hot Pack going here on opening day of my 2021 baseball card season. Could be a long season. This card though, begins to illustrate a bit more of the what will probably be an infinite amount of nuance in the way the player photo is allowed to "frame break" the design elements. Thought since the design elements instead break out of the frame and into the image, I'm not sure that is the best term for this.

A bit of a relief, a classic positional player baseball card stance. I won't forget that I have a 2021 Topps Baseball card of Oakland Athletics player #20, though I'm not totally sure just exactly who that is. My mind now connects Oakland, and #20, and a batter, named "Mark" it appears. Maybe it's "Mike" though. And there is a C involved in his name too. I think.

Ahh, now I have another card that I was looking for without even knowing it before I ripped open this pack. I can more easily read Willie Calhoun's name here than the name on the previous card. I remember pulling various examples of Willie's Rookie Cards in 2018 but that is my last memory of him. So this new card allows me to figure out: what happened to Willie Calhoun? As it turns out, not much.

But this is something I will write about a little more in my next post sometime soon. It's not going to be a good year for my long running habit of Yeah, I Read the Backs.

Now we are into the most important part of a "pack" of baseball cards, for most collectors these days - the inserts, or in this case, a simple foil parallel. They look quite nice this year. However I have my doubts that I will ever accumulate even 9 of them for a nice binder page of shiny goodness. We'll see.

Now this 2nd insert I like very much. A nod to the very first Topps Baseball set on it's 70th Anniversary, it appears these will appear in each and every pack of 2021 Topps Baseball cards. These are printed on what is usually now called "vintage" stock with that nice cardboardy heft to them that always makes for a pleasing stack of cards to paw through to check on checklist completion status. 

This small checklist of 50 cards has two things going for it that somewhat differentiate it from other re-print/retro takes on previous Topps designs: there is no gloss on the front of the card, which gives them much more of a warm, analog feel to them, and the images used are live action baseball photos. The result is something quite different than actual 1952 Topps Baseball cards. Although I both like facsimile signatures on baseball cards and dislike the amount of white space used up to hold what are sometimes a decidedly tiny signature like this one, the sum total of live action + that kept simple 1952 design quite appeals to me. Binder worthy. I basically wish I could buy whole packs of these things, but alas, we must now return to 2021 Series One:

Sometimes, the image overruling the graphic and the whole diagonal flow of the whole thing just works. On this card, even the new Swoosh™ on the uniform, that I wish was not there at all, contributes.

More Diamondbacks. More pitching. More leaning. More flow. Where'd that weird oblong blue thing go? Oh, yeah, the image is more important. See how these cards start to sneak up on you?

I spy a Powder Blue uni....and even a wristband. Though I still don't care for superfluous purple pink whatever pastels, I give Powder Blue a pass on probably technically belonging to the snoozy world of pastels. That 2nd, long angled rectangle on the left side of the card though - Why, Topps, Why?

And I have yet to hear a good baseball card nickname for this opposite of a 'Tatooine' card.

The pitcher drives to the plate...I like this baseball card. It's the Seattle #7 card in my mind though.

So there you have it, my first pack of 2021 Topps Baseball cards. I figure I will mostly enjoy ripping open more packs of these things; the promise of a +1 for my nascent 1952 Topps collection in each pack will definitely be a nice thing about that.

I did buy a whole blaster full of these cards, and found some more goodies along the way, but we'll take a look at those here soon.