I went looking for solace.
I
went looking for connection.
I don’t know if August 19, 2021 can be listed
up there with red letter days in history. It’s certainly no 9/11. A president
didn’t die on that day. A war was not won. Or lost. No sports team captured a
title. There was no coronation. No one was canceled.
Yet.
August
19, 2021.
I
was in my office that afternoon. I was avoiding work as all good citizens
should do. I was on my phone. Screwing around on Twitter. I was reading
baseball feeds. The Pirates had just been swept by the Dodgers. They were
headed to St. Louis and I felt impending dread at their prospects there.
Speaking of prospects; I was beginning to roll the name Elijah Green on my
tongue.
It
was an ordinary day by all accounts.
Even
my lunch was mediocre.
The
biggest news in The Hobby was still that PWCC scandal, which I still don’t
fully understand, except that it has something to do with the Oregon-based
sports card company engaging in “shill bidding.” Shill bidding, as I understand it, is when
your friends, associates etc., bid on an item with the intent of artificially inflating
its value. The scandal got a lot of people in The Hobby riled up. I don’t
gamble on baseball cards or participate in auctions. I buy cards outright. I was a touch less concerned with the
nefarious goings on at PWCC. So August 19, 2021 was an otherwise quiet day in
The Hobby for me too.
Until
it happened.
Around
4pm on August 19, 2021 my Twitter feed started becoming inundated with a small,
content-starved article that simply stated that sports merchandising mega-house
Fanatics had secured the exclusive license to manufacture Major League Baseball
cards. Fanatics would have the exclusive license of the MLBPA (Major League
Baseball Players Association) in 2023, and Major League Baseball itself (logos
and stuff) in 2025. MLB and the MLBPA would be ending it’s 70-year relationship
with the Topps corporation come 2026.
That
was it.
That
was the whole article.
Say
what?
My
first thought was that the article had to be a joke. April Fool’s Day in
August. Someone who knew we were all bored/terrified of reading about the Delta
Variant of the Covid-19 virus, and wanted to shake things up. Or somebody was
mis-informed. Mis-information is a bedrock in America. Somebody was being an
asshole because they like to sow chaos and rile people up.
Of course, Major
League Baseball/Players Association wasn’t ending its relationship with Topps.
That bond was sacred right? There’s a tradition there. The entire foundation of
the sport is built on tradition! Cheating, booze, loose women, cheating, and
cheating too. But tradition. Baseball loves tradition.
Turns
out Major League Baseball loves money more.
Fanatics
was willing to pony-up more than Topps.
Money
talks.
Tradition
walks a marathon.
Regardless,
the story was true.
When
the news really hit me, I felt sad. Gutted. Felt like I’d lost a good friend.
Albeit a “friend” whose revenue stream totaled 567-million dollars in 2020. But
a friend all the same. In an instant all I could think was: Topps base. Gone.
Topps Heritage. Gone. Topps Chrome. Gone. Gypsy Queen. Gone. Allen &
Ginter. Gone. Stadium Club. Gone. Bowman…maybe gone…but gone soon. All of those
people who got up that morning feeling secure in their jobs. Gone.
All
of it.
Gone.
And,
yeah, Topps is a company. I get that. And I’m not one to get mushy over
corporations. And loving a brand? I’ve always been suspect toward people who are Disney fanatics. I don’t like
Disney. Disney produces (mostly) mediocre garbage for mass consumption. Or they purchase
other people’s garbage for mass consumption.
I don’t like that
Disney owns The Muppets. Or Star Wars. Or Fox Pictures. Or Marvel. Or whatever
else they own that makes them one homogenous corporation whose mascot is a
purposeless rat with no soul. A rodent who stands for nothing.
But
that afternoon I began to understand Disney fans.
Topps is my Disney. I guess. I’ve written it here before but it bears repeating now. Topps was the first pack of cards that I ever opened. 1980, as a six-year-old. The pack was bought for me by my grandma in a 5 and Dime store on Butler Street in the Lawrenceville section of Pittsburgh. I was hooked from that moment on.
That singular event, that single pack of cards yielded twelve straight years of obsessive card collecting.
And
subsequently a return to The Hobby years later when I needed it the most.
Though I came of
age in The Hobby when Fleer and Donruss didn’t seem like interlopers, but just
another card option, I always gravitated toward Topps. Theirs were the designs
that I was most excited for each year. Topps was always the first packs that I
bought. When I could afford my first wax box, it was Topps that I went running
too.
My first team sets were Topps. The first set that I ever built, 1988, was Topps. When I was moving away from collecting, the last two years I was in The Hobby I only bought Topps. When I came back in 2019, it was Topps, not Panini, that I sought out. If Topps’ mascot was a peppy rat with no soul, who stood for nothing, I’d probably worship at his altar too.
It’s funny. Prior to that August afternoon I’d been thinking a lot about Topps by way of Upper Deck. I’d finally gotten around to reading Pete Williams’ insightful Card Sharks: How Upper Deck Turned a Child’s Hobby into a High Stakes, Billion Dollar Business. It’s a pretty good read. And while I was never the biggest Upper Deck fan, and do blame them, in part, for hastening my exit from The Hobby back in the day; the book has a few chapters on the history of card collecting prior to Upper Deck.
You know, the whole Topps vs Bowman business.
Then the decades of drama between Topps and Fleer.
To be frank, Topps
was kind of the Fanatics of its day.
If there’s a
heaven or a hell, I’m sure there are Fleer and Bowman executives from the
1950s-1970s who are smiling up or down upon the world right now.
Paybacks are
indeed a bitch.
The Williams book
touched on that famous story about how the Topps warehouse was left with cases
upon cases of the High Series of 1952 Baseball cards because
retailers couldn’t sell them as they were printed so late and consumers had
moved onto other products. In the story, by 1960, Topps badly needed the
warehouse space. So those cases of 1952 cards that had been lingering around
for 8 years had to go. Topps president Sy Berger hired a tugboat to take said
cases of cards out into the Atlantic Ocean to dump them.
The 1952 Mickey
Mantle card was in that sunken series.
It was his first Topps card.
Some debate that
its Mantle’s true rookie.
In January a mint-condition
1952 Mickey Mantle card sold for 5.2-million.
To say the card is
legendary doesn’t do its history justice.
For me, it was a
location thing in the Williams book that again attracted me to the story. Back
in the 1950s, the Topps offices/manufacturing plant were located in the Bush
Terminal Building in the Sunset Park neighborhood of Brooklyn. The Pier that
Mr. Berger launched his tugboat sits at the end of the warehouse.
Like a thirty-minute
walk from my apartment.
Last year when
Covid was initially raging, and we were stuck in Brooklyn 24/7, my wife and I
used to take walks down the Bush Terminal. It was the only way we could safely
just be out of our neighborhood for a few hours. We’d walk around listening to
music or podcasts, or just bullshitting. I took pictures from the pier.
Manhattan in the distance. The Statue of Liberty. I had no clue about the Topps
connection to Bush Terminal. But after finishing the Williams’ book, I thought
about going back. Taking pictures. Writing a blog post about it.
But then August
19, 2021 happened.
And instead, I
went looking for solace.
And I went looking
for connection.
I’m a pretty big
fan of the podcast About the Cards. Every week, Ben Wilson, Stephan Loeffler
and, until recently, Tim Shepler, promised us folks in The Hobby “a hopefully smart
and insightful podcast discussing trading card collecting.” And they always
deliver. When I saw that the About the Cards guys (with Shepler back in the
fold for one night only) were going to do a special episode of the podcast
addressing the Topps/Fanatics drama, I knew I wanted to hear what they and
their guests had to say.
And, of course,
the guys and their guests didn’t disappoint. There was some shock on the
episode, obviously. A lot of figuring out what had happened. How Topps had
gotten to this place. Admittedly, there was some schadenfreude from angry
collectors who felt that Topps wasn’t holding up its end of the bargain in
terms of quality. How maybe they had been taking advantage of collectors for
too long. Coasting, if you will. There was some discussion that maybe what
happened between Topps, MLB and Fanatics was a little bit…deserved.
Perhaps Topps doth
assumed to much that the MLB licenses would always be theirs.
But of all of the
hosts/guests on that fantastic special episode, it was returning host, Tim
Shepler, who best summed up what I was feeling. When asked for his reaction to
the news of Topps losing its license to produce baseball cards, Shepler said,
and I paraphrase, “I was shocked and, just like sad all of the sudden, because
I have this wall of Topps over here to my right just of all the Football and
Baseball sets, I’ve put together over the years. It felt like you’re losing a
friend all of the sudden.”
Shocked.
Sad.
All of those years
building sets.
Which is exactly
how I was feeling. And, again, I know Topps is a company. Topps exists to make
money. Topps is the Disney of trading cards. Topps has jaded a number of
collectors. Topps has “watered down” The Hobby. Topps got what it “deserved.”
Blah.
Blah.
Blah.
That may or may
not be true, or simply a matter of perspective. That hasn’t been my history,
past or present, with Topps. As a kid, the brand symbolized, more than Fleer or
Donruss, or especially Score or Upper Deck ever could, the coming of the
baseball season, the coming of summer freedom. Lazy days. No school. Endless
hours of promise and discovery. Simple fun. As a retuning collector…I wanted
that nostalgia. That feeling.
This!
Topps might sell nostalgia.
But they’re
selling my nostalgia.
They might as well
have a peppy, soulless rat as their mascot.
To be fair, my
take/feelings on Topps stems from a naivety because I wasn’t a long-term
collector into adulthood. I stopped collecting at 18, bought some packs here and
there over the years, really tried again in 2007-2008, but ultimately didn’t
get back into The Hobby until summer of 2019. I’ve never been cheated an autograph
in a Hobby Box. Never been on hold with Topps customer service for a lifetime.
Don’t have an opinion on much of anything from 1994-2018. I mean, I do, but
what’s sour grapes for products that I wasn’t even there for?
In short, I’m not at
all discounting long-term collector’s gripes.
Full disclosure, I
don’t know much about Fanatics. And what I’ve learned I don’t really care for.
I don’t like behemoths who go around purchasing everything they want. See my
Disney diatribe above. And I don’t know what it means for The Hobby going
forward with a company like Fanatics having the license to exclusively produce
baseball cards (and now basketball cards and football cards...for 20 goddamned years!), and having
the sports “investor” dude from StockX running the show.
It doesn’t feel promising
to me.
And, yeah, I guess
it’s cool that the leagues and players have equity in the deal. If you’re
thinking about small-market teams or players making the league minimum. But
otherwise, the deal stinks of greed.
The rich getting
richer.
But.
Maybe Fanatics
will get to buy Topps like they wanted to back in 2020, and nothing in the
chain of collecting will be disturbed. A big fish gets eaten by a bigger fish
and we can all go about our business, right? Except for people who will lose their
jobs. Maybe Fanatics will buy Panini too, and we can live in some bizarro world
where Topps, Score and Donruss brands are all owned and released by the same company.
and we get these again:
Maybe Fanatics and the StockX bro will start from scratch and make the best baseball, basketball and football cards The Hobby has ever seen. And they’ll be affordable too! Imagine a basketball hobby box that doesn’t cost $1000, or a football one that doesn’t cost $300. Maybe they’ll put out a quality product for young collectors. Maybe base sets will be AFFORDABLE to young collectors. Maybe the customer service at Fanatics will be top-notch, and all of the people bitching about Topps will fall to their knees in absolute adulation and worship of our new hobby overlords.
Maybe.
But I don’t think
so.
Maybe Fanatics
will buy Disney. Or Disney will buy Fanatics. And Google or Amazon can buy
them. One big mass media/sports/entertainment/news conglomerate. The media
empire to end all media empires!
Then it can be one
stop shopping for Marvel, Star Wars, Muppets, Fox Movies, MLB, NBA, and the
NFL. And maybe, at some point in the future, we’ll all be opening up a pack of
Fanatics cards that we bought from Amazon, while doing a Google Search on our
Iphones for some movie that we want to watch on Disney Plus, after we shut off
the game from the MLB, NFL, or NBA Network. A game that isn’t blacked-out in
our areas.
Maybe.
But I don’t think
so.
Truth is, we just
don’t know yet. It’s like what About the Cards host, Ben Wilson said: “This is
the tip of the iceberg.” We’re just seeing the top layer of this. Us collectors
don’t know what’s happening underneath the water, because it sure FEELS like things have been happening for a long time. We simply don’t know. And I guess that’s the confusing part right now.
And confusion and
not knowing sucks.
But whatever does
happen…I’ll give Fanatics the benefit of the doubt. At least initially, I will.
I’ll see what they have to offer. I’ll go online or (hopefully) into a brick or
mortar LCS, and I’ll buy a pack of Fanatics cards, or whatever StockX bro calls the brand. I’ll open them with
anticipation. I’ll flip through the cards looking for the hot star card, or hot
rookie. Whatever inserts they put in the cards. My favorite player. My favorite
team.
Pretend I’m in a 5
and dime on Butler Street back in 1980.
I owe it to that
six-year-old kid who loved The Hobby so much.
If you’d like to view that special episode of About the Cards you can do so HERE
I was even ON the podcast one time back in November 2020!
NEXT FRIDAY: Fourteen and overweight, lovelorn over girls who wouldn't look twice at me, a little New Jack Swing music to get me through it....I can only be talking about one thing here, folks! 1988 Topps Football cards.
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