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Product Spotlight: 2012 Topps Series 1

Posted by on 26 February 2012 Comments Off on Product Spotlight: 2012 Topps Series 1

Topps remembers Tom Seaver and tries to photoshop out the memory of Jose Reyes

With the [trademarked term for a significant football game] just around the corner at the end of January, one thing was on everyone’s mind – baseball cards!  Topps Series 1 dropped on January 31 with a huge media event that looked like someone put Keith Olbermann and a camera crew in my living room circa 2001.  Anticipation had been building for weeks, filling the 40-day gap since the last Topps product release.  So did the product live up to the hype?

The big news in the lead-up to Topps Series 1 was the inclusion of several short-printed variant cards.  The big ones were photoshopped cards of fan-favorite Jose Reyes and some guy named Al in their new teams’ uniforms (I guess Prince Fielder waited too long to sign).  These were announced as very limited short prints, just to make sure nobody sold them cheap on launch day.  Other SPs included humorous cards showing mascots, Gatorade, and Skip Schumaker’s foot (more on this later).

The theme for the bulk of the insert sets this year is gold.  Golden Moments, Golden Greats, Gold Standard, Gold Futures, gold-colored coins, Gold Rush wrapper redemption cards, and even 1/1 solid gold cards (via redemption of course) filled out the base product.  The Golden Moments insert set filled the annual role of “set spread across all mainline Topps products with relic and autograph variants.”  Manufactured material also got a boost, expanding into metal objects like pins, coins, and rings in addition to the usual cloth offerings (this year’s theme: retired numbers).

With the stage set, launch day held a few surprises.  First, the first-ever card featuring Jose Reyes in a (fake) Marlins uniform was overshadowed by a squirrel.  The Skip Schumaker SP featuring the Cardinals “rally squirrel” was the hot ticket, with one of the first pulled selling for over $600.  After a few ending in the $300+ range, prices quickly settled down to the $100-200 level.  These should bottom out somewhere in the $20-$50 range, which is still absurd.  The Reyes card meanwhile is settling in at about $50-$100, not that it matters.  This is supposed to be about the Mets after all.

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2011 Mets Game-Used Year in Review

Posted by on 31 December 2011 Comments Off on 2011 Mets Game-Used Year in Review

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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