2011 was another dismal season for the Mets on the field, but who needs actual games when you have baseball cards? It was a fairly uneventful season there too until the last few weeks, but there were several bright spots.
Going into the first year of the reborn Topps monopoly (Upper Deck still managed to put out a 2010 product with just a MLB Players Association license before getting sued by MLB Properties), I didn’t exactly have high hopes. Take out all that Upper Deck and Donruss have given the hobby on the game-used front over the preceding decade and you would be left with mostly mediocre offerings. Even after just the loss of Donruss and Fleer in 2005, variety in game-used offerings has taken a nosedive; taking Upper Deck out of the picture certainly isn’t going to help. Gone are the days of finding pieces of hats, gloves, shoes, and other random items embedded in cardboard (I can live without game-used dirt cards). Gone too are the days of even having any details of the item mentioned on the card – “Congratulations! You have received pieces of stuff used in a game of some sort!” Based on how Topps seemed to be dumping its excess game-used inventory into cards in 2010 (some cards featured pieces of jerseys from events dating back to 2002), the days of timely and relevant game-used pieces (aside from the annual All-Star game insert sets) seemed long past. 2011 had a few surprises though, giving hope for some interesting products in the years to come (especially now that Panini, aka Donruss Mk. III, is in the market with a license from the MLB Players Association).
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38 cards in, you might be feeling some fatigue. But these last 12 are worth the wait. In a normal year, any one of them could be a legitimate best card of the year. But in 2017, 11 of them fell short. If you’ve ever followed a big case breaker, you would know that hits like this typically fall much less than one per case. Prior to 2017, I had pulled a total of 15 cards that would fit in this range. And while only one of 2017’s hits would (barely) crack my top 5, the sheer quantity of this level of quality is unprecedented in my decades of collecting. And that has me worried.
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