I have talked to a lot of collectors like me who were baseball card crazy in the 80's and 90's and lost interest a little after that. Whether we found girls or other hobbies to invest out time or that baseball hit a lull that didn't interest us, many of us have found our way back to our cardboard addictions. For me, I have come back with training wheels on. When I was a serious (as serious as a 12 year old can be) collector back in the 90's I understood the hobby. In those pre-internet to pre-ebay days the Beckett was your bible and everything was black and white so it seemed. Today's cards are beautiful but annoyingly complex. Collectors in my opinion are taken advantage of by card companies with an noncollectable amount of variations. Rookie cards used to be when a guy put in enough time in the bigs, now Bowman cards throw high school kids on cards just to have the first card out of mostly never big league players. Anyway, that is way more bitching than I like to post. Check out
The Lost Collector for a much better description of how us returning collectors feel.
I say all this because recently I grabbed a blaster box of 2016 Topps Update. It was marked 25% off so I bit. I was confused by a lot of the cards. Here are some pulls:
These Seager cards are of great confusion to me. One is a RC, one is not? They are from the same box, the same pack actually. What's the deal? How many Seager cards are even in this set and why?
Now Mazara who looks to be a great up and comer for Texas. Why two cards that celebrate the same thing?
Why do some RC's contain two players? So Seager gets a handful of RC variations and Dae-Ho Lee gets 1/2?
Couldn't they find a Berrios picture of him doing something else? Why make two cards almost the same and just turn one?
I thought these inserts looked sweet!
Another insert set.
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| A nice Gold Numbered RC |
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| The Fire inserts are awesome but too common. |
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| A lot of the photos rival Stadium Club. |
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| Rainbow foil or refractor or something like that. |
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| Awesome photo of Trumbo. |
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| Heavy-ass medallion card. |
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| Strange Franklin advertising card. |
Glad you get why I was (and still am) lost! Interesting points you bring up. I don't blame you for being confused.
ReplyDeleteThe Topps Hype Machine puts out regular cards, Rookie Debuts (with date), All-Star cards, League Leaders, etc. that all look like regular cards....of certain rookie phenoms. Because rookies are all everybody wants according to the suits in their meetings - none of which are actual collectors, it seems.
ReplyDeleteWell said!
Deletethe glut of the 90s is still with us today. i miss the simple: nice designs, collation, and photo selection. not the same shot on ten different Topps products.
ReplyDelete