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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