"If this isn't the biggest bag-over-the-head, punch-in-the-face I ever got, GOD DAMN IT!"...or...some thoughts on the whole Topps/Fanatics "thing."

 

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.

 Thanks for reading! Happy Collecting!

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! 

 Wax Ecstatic is another sports card podcast that I love. Host Matt Sammon wrote a blog post on the Topps/Fanatic ordeal on his new web site, which you can check out right HERE. *Sadly, Matt announced on Thursday that he was ending the Wax Ecstatic podcast due to time issues. While I understand, on a personal note, I'm sad, as it was my favorite podcast. But Matt did an amazing job and he left 189 episodes that you can listen to wherever you get your podcasts or right HERE *

 Just this Monday, Sports Card Nation's John Newman (yet another fantastic and informative podcast) weighed in on the Topps/Fanatics situation on his sister program Hobby Quick Hits. If you follow this LINK you can find it. Or check Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

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.