2023 Topps Series 1 : in Which I'm Late to the Party...Again.

 

You guys sick of 2023 Topps Series 1 yet?

            I don’t know about you, but my card Twitter timeline has been full of 2023 Topps Series 1. Mostly the bells and whistle cards, and other inserts. How dare we show a base card as an expression of our excitement! Anyone who reads this blog, knows that I’m still a fan of base cards. That I primarily focus on the base series. For the past two seasons, other than Pirates and certain players, base cards have been my purchasing focus. That’s not going to change for this season, although, and maybe it’s just me, but is getting any information about Topps upcoming releases becoming hard to find? Usually, we know about Heritage or Gypsy Queen by now.

            But I digress.

            This is a blog post about 2023 Topps Series 1.

            And I like them.

            I really like them.

            2023 Topps might rival or beat 2019 Topps as my favorite base set since returning to collecting. Obviously, Topps is doing a connecting-through-the-decades thing with the players picture on the front of the card, along with the now ubiquitous (minus 2020 Update) action shots. I like having that card connection to 1963, 1983 and 2003. Topps makes it a point to drown collectors in nostalgia. If Topps hadn’t put those small pictures on the front of their base cards this season, well, it would’ve been an insult to all of us who eat from their nostalgia trough collecting season after collecting seasons.

            Another thing Topps likes to drown collectors in…is rookie cards. 2023 Topps is no exception. Of the 330 base cards, 58 of them have been given over to players with one season or experience or less. The big ones are in there. The guys who some of us are anticipating are in there. And there are a lot of cup of coffee type players given the RC treatment. I don’t want to deny a player their cardboard glory, but, like last season, I counted a decent amount of players getting their RC who are of far side of being considered young or a prospect.

            With the younger players, sometimes Topps withholds, and makes you wait.

            But sometimes they jump the gun.

            Case in point, Liover Peguero and Travis Swaggerty of my own Pittsburgh Pirates.

            Both Peguero and Swaggerty have RC in Topps 2023 Serries 1. Neither of them should. Peguero was in the bigs for one game, as an emergency stop-gap fill-in from the Pirates AA Altoona Curve team. He went 1-3 and then went back to spend the rest of the season in AA. He’s a highly touted prospect. I’ve been collecting Liover’s Bowman cards. I was looking forward to his eventual RC. But this feels kind of cheap. Most likely Liover Peguero isn’t seeing Pittsburgh this season.

            It’s almost the same deal with Swaggerty. He’s a former 1^st round draft pick who, through injuries etc, has had a bit of a struggle getting to the big leagues. He did in 2023…for five games and a total of nine at bats.

            Instead of rookie cards, maybe it would be cool if Topps paid more attention to he actual, final team roster. At least three of the Pirates base player cards feature cards for players who no longer play on the team. 

            Here's two of them.

            This happened in 2022 as well. Look, I know when some of us were kids, it was expected that your following season’s team set would feature players on it who were no longer on the team. This was especially true before cards started coming in series again in the late 1990s. But this is 2023. I think we can do better Topps.

            Anyway, I bought a Hobby box of 2023 Series 1. Let's see what was inside.

            I'm not a pleasure delayer. I open the Silver Pack first.

            For you folks who like the first card from the first pack moment, here's mine.

    

            Hey, look, the League Leader cards actually look like League Leader cards this season, instead of pretending to look like an extra base cards for a star player.

            I still wish Topps would group League Leader cards together like they used to do.

            These guys all came in the same pack.

            So did these guys.

            And Topps put them together sequentially in the checklist….you tugging-at-the-heart-strings-Fanatics-owned-monolith, you.

            Another year, another stud Braves rookie I wil refuse to like because of a now thirty-obne-year-old grudge.

            it wouldn't be a Topps Hobby Box for me if I didn't get a Joey Votto insert. This year did not disappoint.

            And here are the other 1988 Inserts.

            As a kid I was never a huge fan of 1988 cards. 1987 designs ruled for me, so there was no real way for 1988 cards to be anything letdown for me. Time has changed that perspective. While I'm still not the biggest 1988 Fleer fan, I've really come around to 1988 Donruss and 1988 Topps. I think I can safely say this is one of the most beautiful cards from my collecting era.

            Topps gave Bo Jackson a 1988 insert card in 2023 Series 1. I don't need to see it. I don't want to see it...I'll always have the original.

            Here are some other bells and whistles.

    

            From the what-in-the-hell-am-I-going-to-do-with-this Relic files. I offer up my 2023 addition to the collection.

    

            If I remotely cared about modern pitching, I'd actually be excited for these inserts.

            But I'm old...so I'm not.

            And that about did it for the ol’ 2023 Topps Series 1 Hobby Box.

            Except I’m not telling the whole story here.

            Because I’m embarrassed.

            I made a collecting plan this season…and I didn’t keep it.

            In fact, I blew the plan up.     

            My plan was to go even more conservative this year. Buy a Hobby Box and pull the players that I wanted from it. Buy the other cards I wanted online or join breaks. No extra Hobby boxes. No spending money putting a set together, especially when the whole thing comes out in the summer and I could just buy it then. Good plan, huh? Good fiscally conservative plan.

            Except that’s not what I did.

            I got this raging sense of FOMO Usually I can control it. This year I couldn’t. So, instead of buying one Hobby box and calling it a day. I bought a damned Jumbo box too.

            These are the major highlights from it.

            So much for personal control, huh?

            Anyway…if anyone needs help building a set.

 Thanks for Reading! Happy Collecting!

NEXT FRIDAY: Our good friend Russell Streur returns to talk Formula 1 racing! 

            

           

CUTCH

 

I’m not a man who dwells on the past.

            That’s a bold-faced lie.

            I think a lot about the past.

            At times, I can become a man consumed with the past.

            There are slights from grade school that I still ponder.

            So, it’s no surprise to me to hitch upon the fact that this coming President’s Day marks 20 years since my, now wife, and I signed a lease for an apartment in Brooklyn. Or the fact that come this April 5^th, it’ll be 20 years since I left my home city of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Twenty years since she and I packed up all of our meager belongings and two cats, ranted a U-Haul, dealt with a sudden gall bladder surgery, and hightailed it out of the only home I’d ever know, save one strange year in West Virginia.

            Twenty years.

Time flies when you’re trying to live a life.

But it kind of seems like yesterday to me.

I could give you all of the gory details: the cockroaches, the rats, the upstairs neighbor who’s teenage son couldn’t get enough rap music; the bar we claimed as home base, only to have someone there steal my fiancé’s wallet; the bas temp jobs; the bad actual jobs; my fiancé’s dad’s stage four cancer surgery; more cockroaches; more rats; the casual President’s Day weekend in 2004, where we horrifyingly watched a white Pitt Bull murder a German Shepard from our living room window; the gang members; the Guardian Angels on my block.

But this is a blog about baseball cards.

And, aside from two other years in Buffalo, I’ve made Brooklyn my home for 18 of those last 20 years.

So, it couldn’t all be bad, right?

The Pitt Bull murder…that was bad.

You gain a lot when you leave home. New experiences. New perspectives. You get to see how other people live. If nothing else, New York City was an absolute SHOCK to my system. I’d been there a few times. I’d never envisioned moving there. I was always going to end up on the West Coast. But then there I was, half-drunk on the F train at two in the morning, on a train packed full of drunken people, watching some homeless dude eat a stack of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches while drinking a gallon whole milk.

To paraphrase Dorothy Gale, I wasn’t in Kansas anymore.

This isn’t to say anything bad about Pittsburgh, or that it was cornfed: a run-in with a pimp at two in the morning in Downtown Pittsburgh stopped me from such idyllic thinking as that. But I was spinning my wheels in Pittsburgh. I was working a drone job. My fiancé and I spent our weekends doing the same thing: basically, going to malls and strip malls in the suburbs. I’d stop going to museums. I’d stopped going to shows. I’d stopped even bothering to try and write. I was on the cusp of twenty-nine-years-old, floundering and sinking and I didn’t even realize it. When my mom suggested that my fiancé and I look for a home in the Pittsburgh suburb of Edna, we nodded our heads in blank resignation.

Because wasn’t that what we were supposed to do?

But my future father-in-law’s cancer diagnosis changed all of that.

You lose a lot when you leave home. Familiarity. Repetition. Routine. The constant presence of family and friends in your life. Of all of the things that I gained and lost in moving from Pittsburgh to Brooklyn, I lost a closeness with my Pittsburgh Pirates. Granted, baseball is probably not to most important component here. But this is a baseball card blog, and we’re going to eventually discuss baseball and look a baseball cards.

So, let’s pretend the loss of access to the Pirates was epic in my life.

I mean, it was…to an extent. I was, and still am, a HUGE Pirates fan…although they’ve barely given me reason to be over the last, oh, three or four decades. But I’ve proudly watched a lot of bad baseball. Rooted for a lot of bad players.

Put mediocrity on a pedestal because we didn’t have much else to cheer for.

***Okay, brief aside, Jason Kendall and Brian Giles are not mediocre ballplayers. But Kendall was a 

solid defensive catcher, who hit singles, and who's status was elevated because he played on some 

crappy Pirates teams. Brian Giles hit a lot of home runs...but what did it matter when the team was 

losing 90+ games a season****

            Also....

            ...I always liked Kevin Young more.

            Anyway....

I grew up in Three Rivers Stadium.

I marveled at the stunning beauty of PNC Park and what my tax dollars helped give to me and other fans. But it never felt like it was my place, the two seasons that I still lived in Pittsburgh. I could never envision myself watching games there until I became the old man that I’m turning into now. That burning desire to get out, shake things up...it overwhelmed me at times.

Sigh…I know 2003 was 20 years ago. And though it feels like yesterday, there are tangible truth that firmly say that year belongs in the past. Cell phones flipped. Ipods were new. There was nothing “smart” about anything. If you accessed this blog via social media…well, that wasn’t really around or too popular in 2003 either. There was no MLBTV for me to pretend that I was at home in Pittsburgh, watching the Buccos on a casual Tuesday night, like I do now. As I adjusted to my new life in New York, the 2003 Pirates season came and went for me without a blip. They were 75-87 (a record I’d kill for now). So did the 2004 season. 2005. Etc. You get my drift. I lost touch with a team that had been so important to me and my life in Pittsburgh.

And I know I missed a lot of bad baseball.

Really, really bad baseball.

But I also missed the debut of this guy.

The chance to root for him on a regular basis.

And I missed those resurgent Pirates teams that made the playoffs from 2013-2015.

Not necessarily missed…just not close to them.

Not like I was with these guys.

Maybe it's age. Maybe it’s displacement. I watch baseball and collect cards, but I don't feel nearly as empassioned about the players as I did as a kid, when they were walking, talking gods. I know I'm not the same kinf fan now. But it does sadden me that those Pirates teams Andrew McCutchen was a part of; they’ll never mean to me what they mean to other Pirates fan who watched them on a daily basis. And, I guess, that’s the deal you make when you chose to leave a place. You give up something to gain something else. No Cutch…but I can see Starry Night whenever I want.

And getting to see two guys ain't so bad.

*snuck a lil' 2023 preview in there*

But I am a home towner at heart.

I’ve had MLBTV since 2019, and I’ve spent the past four seasons catching up with my old hometown team on a nightly basis during baseball season. Rolling my eyes at bad baseball. Cheering when I see a glimmer of hope. PNC Park is a regular stop when I come home to Pittsburgh, because technology has allowed to me to feel invested in the Pirates again. I’ve started to collect the cards of the current players.

Making new favorites.

Setting my hopes on the future.

…but…

There was still something bothering me.

An itch I wanted to scratch.

In January, it was announced that the Pittsburgh Pirates had signed Andrew McCutchen to a one-year/5-million-dollar contract. Cutch was coming home to Pittsburgh after five seasons in the wilderness! Okay, San Francisco, New York, Philadelphia and Milwaukee. Not the wilderness per se, but the wilderness to Pirates fans who loved and missed Cutch.

For me…it felt like a second chance to see a player whom I missed out.

As a collector, it meant a chance to recoup on some of Andrew McCutchen’s glory years in black and gold.

And that’s exactly what I did recently.

Hey, Neil Walker is back in Pittsburgh too…as an announcer…so why not stock up on all of his cards that I missed out on too!

Look, I’m not fooling myself. I know that Andrew McCutchen is thirty-six. I know the glory years, the MVP years, have been gone for some time. I don’t think any serious Pirate fan should expect Cutch to party like it 2013 again. But I don’t think this is a nostalgia act. The Pirates were always going to bring in some vet who batted .230 and still had a little bit of pop in his bat to try and help the team.

They already brought in these guys.

*I'm an admitted Ji-Man Choi fan....so I'm also excited for him to be in Pittsburgh*

If you’re going to spend the five million, why not spend it on Andrew McCutchen?

To be honest, I’ll take his bat over the inept and anemic hitting I saw on last year’s team.

And I can’t wait to go to PNC Park and buy myself a t-shirt with number 22 emblazoned on the back!

I missed out on Andrew McCutchen first time around.

I’m going to be present an accountable this season.

And one last thing: this image floated around Twitter yesterday:

I sighed so contentedly when I saw it, my wife actually stopped what she was doing to ask me what was up. I said, It's nothing, honey. It's Cutch. And Key. It's Cutch and Key.

And it felt so GOOD to say that.

 Thank you for reading! Happy Collecting!

NEXT FRIDAY: Topps 2023 Series 1…obviously.

 

Happy Birthday BABE RUTH by Russell Streur

 

                                                 HAPPY BIRTHDAY BABE RUTH

 

                                        Megacards, The Babe Ruth Collection, 1992, Card 116.

 

George Herman “Babe” Ruth was born into a poor family along Baltimore’s waterfront in 1895 in what is now the Camden Yards neighborhood.  Of eight children, only Babe and a younger sister survived infancy.  “I spent most of the first 7 years of my life living above my father’s saloon.  When I wasn’t living over it, I was in it,” Babe said.  Largely unsupervised, he began to chew tobacco, drink, and roam the streets.  His parents placed him in St. Mary’s Industrial School for Boys until baseball rescued him from the reformatory during his teenage years.  He died of throat cancer in 1948 at the age of 53.

 

Babe Ruth turned 33 years old on Sunday, February 6, 1927.   The Los Angeles Times pictured him that day carrying a generous brace of ducks off a dock on Sweetwater Lake near San Diego after the slugger went hunting for some dinner. 

 

Ruth needed the diversion.  He’d been arrested three days earlier on a charge of violating California’s child labor laws.  As part of a vaudeville act, Ruth had called a few boys on stage to receive autographed baseballs.  An over-zealous state labor deputy nabbed the home run king on the shaky grounds the boys had therefore become part of the performance.

 

A court date was set for that Monday.  Ruth was not inclined to appear.  Laterally extending his nativity on the calendar, he explained to reporters that the seventh was his birthday, and he didn’t want to spend it in court.

 

He was soon acquitted of the frivolous charge.

 

                                     Megacards, The Babe Ruth Collection, 1992, Card 139.

 

Ruth was often described as just  a big kid himself.  “The Babe never grew old,” said his wife, Claire.  “He was excited about each new day—the way a kid is when he wakes up in the morning.”  Babe never forgot the hard times of his youth, and he visited orphanages and hospital wards during his playing career and in later life.  “Babe visited dozens of hospitals because he loved children, not because he was looking for publicity,” teammate Lefty Gomez said.  “I knew plenty of hospitals he went to that nobody knew about, which was the way he wanted it.”

 

In early March of 1927, Ruth signed the biggest contract to date in baseball history, agreeing to a three-year term with  the  Yankees at $70,000 per year.  The salary exceeded the annual contract of Baseball Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis by $5,000 and beat Ty Cobb’s paycheck by $10,000.   

 

Full-time umpire and nighthawk writer Billy Evans gave Ruth a birthday present in a story that circulated before the signing, lauding the Babe’s all-around skills in the outfield, on the basepaths, and at the plate.

 

“As a matter of fact, there are not more than half dozen outfielders who can cover more ground than Ruth,” Evans began.  “When it comes to throwing, Tris Speaker is the only  left-hand throwing outfielder who is more accurate.  Ruth gets greater distance.  On the bases, for a big fellow Ruth is remarkably fast. He tops his  speed with a deceptive slide.  At bat, Ruth is much more than a mere slugger,” Evans concluded.  “He is an adept bunter, drags the ball well, and when he wants to, can hit to most any field.”

 

But his home runs made the biggest news that year.  All spring and summer, Ruth and Lou Gehrig hammered American League pitching.  On Labor Day, both were tied with 44 home runs in a battle to break Ruth’s then-record of 59.  Baseball had never seen anything like it.  Then Gehrig somehow lost his stroke and went 19 games without putting a ball into the seats; Ruth hit five in the next two days and added 11 more as the season ran down.

 

In the midst of the race to  60, Paul Gallico considered the man with the big swing.

 

“Ruth without temptation might be a pretty ordinary fellow.  Part of his charm lies in the manner in which he succumbs to every temptation that comes his way,” the New York Daily News columnist mused.  “Ruth is either planning to cut loose, is cutting loose, or is repenting the last time he cut loose.  He is a news story on legs going about looking for a place to happen.”

 

Gallico also saw virtue between the lines.  The writer buttonholed Yankee owner Jacob Ruppert in an open letter supporting Ruth’s demand for a raise.  “There’s this too,” Gallico began.  “The Babe is honest.  Certainly his name has never been linked with ball games bought and paid for, presents to pitchers, pools and all the other pretty things that have been uncovered recently,” the columnist warned.  “Because if you want baseball to have a real jolt from which it would take years to recover, let there be a proved story that Ruth is crooked.”

 

Babe Ruth.  The one and only.  Happy Birthday.

                                   Topps Conlon Collection, 1995, Babe Ruth’s 100^th Birthday.

 

 Russell Streur

 

Collecting by the Book: RICKEY

 

I’d never considered Rickey Henderson.

            Let me be more specific.

            Yes, I had considered Rickey Henderson. I considered him a great ballplayer to watch. A fun ballplayer, before fun meant bat-flipping and celebrating an April win like you’d just won the World Series. Not that I mind that flare in current baseball. Makes up for all of the walks and strikeouts. Obviously, Rickey was a master base stealer. The Man of Steal. The greatest of all-time. The stolen base champ with an almost (unless the game drastically changes back) untouchable total of 1,406 bases. Rickey is a ten-time all-star. A Gold Glove Award winner. An MVP. He holds the record for runs scored. He’s in the bloody Hall of Fame, where he deserves.

            Of course, I’ve considered Rickey Henderson.

            …I just never considered him, as a collector.

            Yes, I had Rickey Henderson cards as a kid. I collected three ways as a kid: Pirates cards, Star cards, and everyone else. Rickey was a star. His cards were star cards. They went into the star card box with the other stars, accumulated each year whenever the new cards came out. Rickey wasn’t a player I searched for in packs, even though he was regularly breaking records when I was a kid. I didn’t look for Rickey cards at card shows. He was just another star card to me, like Robin Yount or Paul Molitor or Ozzie Smith. I never bought into the Rickey flash. The supposed Rickeyisms.

            Maybe it was a West Coast thing.

            Being a kid on the East Coast in the 1980s, I didn’t really get a chance to see Rickey play much.

            Hell, even when he was a Yankee, it was still hard getting American league ball in Pittsburgh.

            So, I kind of surprised myself when this book came out, and I found that I wanted to read it.

            Or maybe it was because of how I felt about Rickey Henderson that I wanted to read Howard Bryant’s biography on him. I wanted to figure out why I wasn’t a Rickey collector as a kid. I wasn’t averse to flash. I adored my Bo Jackson cards. Barry Bonds played in my city for the first seven years of his career. I loved watching The Kid play. I liked flash. But something was missing for me and Rickey, as a collector, and I wanted to find out what it was between us.

            As anyone whose read this blog knows, I’ve been doing certain posts that I’ve been calling “Collecting by the Book.” This was brought on by my desire to begin collecting cards for players I’ve either picked up biographies on, or players that have shown up in certain baseball books. I’ve added some Dick Allen cards to my PC this way. More Dave Parker cards. A Henry Aaron card when I can get them. I just added Bill Buckner to my collection, because of Tyler Kepner’s book on the World Series. And I should have some Ken Caminiti cards coming soon, courtesy of SportLots and the fantastic bio on him that Dan Good released last year.

            I figured Rickey would be a cinch.

            Better start saving up some cash because Rickey don’t come cheap.

            To be honest, I do have some Rickey cards in my collection.

            It seems that as an adult collector I still collect three ways: Pirates cards, Star/Hall-of-Famer cards from my era and Star cards now, and everybody else. I’m kidding on that last one. The guilt of buying boxes of cards, at what they cost now, has turned me, at least somewhat, into a set builder of both the old and the new. The Rickey cards that I have are doubles from packs that I’ve opened, or from cards people sent me when I was getting me feet off the collecting ground after a 27-year absence.

            In fact, I got one of my oldest Rickey cards from someone’s generosity.

            But I’d say most of my Rickey cards these days; they’re in binders or boxes in sets that I’ve either built or am trying to build.

            So did the Howard Bryant magic work on me this time? Will there be a budding Rickey PC that is totally unrelated to doubles or set collecting. Well…no? I want to say that I really enjoyed Bryant’s book. I loved his book on Henry Aaron, so I was an easy sell. The book does a fantastic job of not only solidifying Rickey Henderson’s place in the pantheon of great players, but Bryant puts Rickey into an historical context as well. In the context of The Great Migration. The context of the legions of gifted athletes from Billy Martin to Jimmy Rollins, who have come out of the Oakland area. Howard Bryant dispels the myths of Rickey’s moodiness, his so-called lack of drive. He spends time dissecting the racial intentions behind “Rickey being Rickey,” the third person speaking nonsense, or those Rickeyisms I mentioned above.

            Feel free to look them up because, sadly, there’s too many to mention here.

            The book was a truly wonderful read…but it just didn’t work that collecting magic. I’m not going to be doing some big ComC order on Rickey Henderson. Not like I did with Dick Allen. Or buying all of those Steelers cards and basically beginning to collect football cards again, because of Gary Pomerantz’s book Their Life’s Work. And…I don’t have an answer as to why. If I hazard to guess it’s probably because Rickey isn’t new to me. His cards have always been there, in every season’s packs that I opened, in every set, in every insert set. He was a ubiquitous presence during my collecting years. And simply not a very interesting one to me.

            They say never say never...so who knows.

            But do you know who I did find interesting?

            This guy.

            Lloyd Moseby was also mentioned in Bryant’s book as being another Oakland area talent. I’m kidding that I’m staring a Moseby PC…maybe. But the 1984 Topps card is a special one to me.  I believe I’ve mentioned the blue suitcase and the loss of pretty much every single card I collected from 1980-1983. 1984 was the first rebuild year for me. I was ten. Other than Pirates and Pete Rose, I didn’t really know many of the current stars of the game. Obviously, that would change very quickly. The budding aesthete in me was drawn to the color and design on cards There was just something about the Lloyd Moseby card that I always loved as a kid, even when I began figuring out the collecting pecking order of home team/star card/everybody else.

            But I still like that Lloyd Moseby card.

            Maybe I’ll start collecting just it.

            That said, the Rickey Henderson cards of the collecting world will get me in one way...I'm slowly, very, very slowly working on completing the 1980 set...and guess who's rookie card I don't have?

           

            You guessed it: 

 Thanks for Reading! Happy Collecting!

SPECIAL ALERT: There will be a special EARLY Junk Wax Jay coming February 6, 2023. A celebration of Babe Ruth on his birthday, written by the talented and knowledgeable Russell Streur.