Thank You 2024 Topps Chrome

 

I was going to go to the 2024 National.

            I had selected the days off at work nearly a year before it.

            I had plans.

            I was either going to book a hotel room and fly into Cleveland, or else I was going to kill two birds with one stone, fly into Pittsburgh and visit family, and then take a day trip to Cleveland to go to my first National Sports Card Collectors Show.

            I repeat…I was going to go to the 2024 National.

            It was some time around February of this year, when I found myself in bed, unable to get out of it because of anxiety and fear, turned to my side, and just watching the only true snowfall we had from my bedroom window, that I knew I wasn’t going to spend the money on a hotel room, a flight, to Cleveland or Pittsburgh, that there’d be no strolling from vendor to vendor, spending the money I’d set aside for cards that I’ve been wanting since I got back into collecting five years ago.

            There’d be none of that.

            I wasn’t going to the National.

            Instead, I’ve spent the better part of 2024 falling down, climbing out of and falling back down again, into the pit of some of the worst anxiety I’ve had in my life.

            I had such high hopes for 2024 too.

            I was turning 50.

            The poetry gods had blessed me in December 2023 and January 2024 with some of the best poems I’d written in a long time.

            I finished a novella and it was going to come out on a press.

            I dusted off the Jack Kerouac and Charles Bukoski and was going to have a good old nostalgia trip.

            I was going to go to The National.

            But then February happened.

            Around the middle of July, when I certainly KNEW, I wasn’t going to the National, a bit of that good ol’ FOMO began to creep in. My wife was going that same weekend on her annual “girls weekend,” and I was going to be stuck at home, by my own devices, of course. I made New York City plans. I was going to walk bridges. I was going to finally find where the notorious Five Points area of New York was located. I was going to see some writer’s homes and eat a shit ton of pizza, doing some classic NYC pizza tourism.

            I was going to buy myself some cards to try and quell that FOMO feeling.

            But what?

            I don’t buy much new product outside of Topps base. We have some sports cards shops in Gotham, but they weren’t going to have those cards that I was certain to find at the National. But I had to get something to make up for missing out. And I had that money saved. I was in one of those “climbing back up” periods to this year’s anxiety world tour. What was I going to get to scratch this sports card itch, one, to be quite frank, I wasn’t scratching at very often this year.

            Then I saw this and said why not?

            I’d never bought Chrome in pack form before. I’d bought singles. I wasn’t a massive chrome fan. But I liked the 2024 base design. I knew that Topps had put rookie cards of some of the players they’d screwed us out of in Series 2. I had that saved money. I wasn’t going to the National. I figured why in the hell not.

            And ripping Chrome was…underwhelming?

            I mean it was fun…sort of.

            Ripping packs is fun...if you don’t pay too much attention to the cost.

            If you aren’t in it for the inserts.

            I got the assorted bells and whistles.

            I got some of the big rookies.

            I even pulled this.

            The Langford alone should've been worth the price of admission, right?

            And yet…

            And yet.

            I wasn’t at the National. I wasn’t strolling around from vendor to vendor, maybe meeting other people in The Hobby. I wasn’t looking at Clemente and Aaron cards that I want to add to my collection. I wasn’t looking at vintage cards of common players I’d read about. I wasn’t hemming and hawing over spending too much on one, JUST ONE, Mantle card from his playing days. Instead, I was sitting alone in a Brooklyn apartment absolutely underwhelmed by what I’d bought, made that I’d spent the money on it, and angry that I hadn’t spent the money on going to the National.

            And I didn’t buy anything sports card related for almost two months.

            So, why is this blog post entitled Thank You 2024 Topps Chrome? It’s not Topps Chrome’s fault that I had the reaction I did. It’s a good product. Do I think it’s over-priced? Sure. But that’s not only for me to decide. I entitled this blog post Thank You 2024 Topps Chrome because buying that product, opening it, and feeling like I never wanted to collect another baseball card again…it actually helped me start to remember why I got back into this wonderful Hobby, what I actually valued as a collector, and how I want to go about collecting going forward.

            And how I missed this blog and writing about cards.

            So, I went online and bought some stuff I’d been interested in getting.

            Not the Clemente and Aaron cards, or a blessed Mantle from his playing days.

            Not even anything really expensive and it’s stuff that might be a head scratcher to some of you.

            But I’m excited.

            And I hope to share the stuff here and some upcoming blog posts.

            September 2024 is actually the 5^th anniversary of me coming back to The Hobby.

            I plan on celebrating.

            So, thank you 2024 Topps Chrome for helping me realize this.

            And hopefully I’ll see some of you in Chicago next July.

 

Thanks for reading! Happy Collecting!

 

 

1981 Donruss

Sometimes I like to think about card sets that I love.

            I mean, collecting is supposed to be fun in general, but every collector out there has those sets that stand out for a reason. Maybe it’s the design. Maybe it’s where you were in your collecting life. The first card pack you even opened. The first set you ever built. The first team set that you built. It just that specific year or years of cards that just do it for you.

            These three sets do it for me every single time.

            1987 Topps, Fleer and Donruss, and I’m instantly thirteen-years-old and on my bed going through them on summer nights that were still reasonable enough to be indoors without a fan blowing (for the most part). Those cards paid for (mostly) from the money that I made delivering the morning newspaper. 1987 was probably the highwater mark for me. The year I was most interested. Most invested. 1988 and 1989 were still big too. But the money I made was also going toward cassette tapes and movies, and used VHS tapes of films that I loved. I don’t think I ever loved card collecting like I did in 1987.

            Now, this set/design takes me all of the way back to the beginning.

            1980. I’m six-years-old and I’m at a five and dime (we called it that) with my Grandma on Butler Steet in the Lawrenceville section of Pittsburgh. She’s buying lottery ticket and told me that I could get whatever candy I wanted. Reaching for, probably a Milky Way, I spied a pack of 1980 Topps baseball cards. What are these? I probably said to myself. I remember opening them on the street, after we left the store. Going through the cards. Getting my first Pirates card.

            Okay, that’s not the OG from 1980…but when I got back into collecting, I had to have that card again.

            Good card sets can give you good memories.

            But what about those sets that…don’t make you feel so good?

            For me, it’s this one.

            The first time that I saw 1981 Donruss baseball cards, I was seven-years-old in the backseat of my parent’s car, a moving truck idling behind us, getting ready to leave Pittsburgh for Wellsburg, West Virginia; getting ready to leave the only, city, the only streets, the only home, and the only friends that I ever knew. And I was sad. Even though Wellsburg was under an hour away from Pittsburgh, it felt like I might as well be across the world. And why were we moving? Because my old man had taken a job at a bank in Wellsburg…and the one nagging stipulation was that you had to live in the town.

            It was bye-bye Steel City for me…hello farmland.

            The Donruss cards were, of course, given to me by good ol’ Grandma, who could recognize a fellow addict when she saw one. Opening the cards was supposed to be salve on the wound. I was seven and obviously had no clue about the decades of litigation between Topps and Fleer, the busting of Topps’ monopoly on the The Hobby. That Fleer and Donruss had been making non-sports cards for years. But I did know that Donruss were different from what I was used to. I’d already seen and bought 1981 Topps cards. My buddy Chris and I had found them at George’s Pharmacy on Butler Street. Think those old soda fountain pharmacies if you want to picture George’s.

            And I already liked the design.

            I already had a pile of them stored in that blue suitcase that I used to keep my cards in…until a lesson was learned a few years later.

            My Topps sticker book was already over ½ way filled too…and somewhat ruined (at least the back cover) by Chris’ older sister who spilled cherry Kool-Aid on it.

            But I digress.

            And it’s not that 1981 Donruss cards are bad.

The 605-card set is a bit sloppy with duplicates.

The set sequencing is strange.

But there IS a Marquee rookie card in the set.

And Donruss would go on to make some of the best sets of the Junk Wax Era.

The Hobby could USE a Donruss or a Fleer to give Topps a run for its money again.

It’s just that 1981 Donruss cards were just something for a sad and soon-to-be lonely kid to use to take his mind off moving, to pass the time as the familiar landscape of Pittsburgh morphed into the unfamiliar rural landscape of Wellsburg, West Virginia, with its Main Street that still looked like a relic from the 1950s. 1981 Donruss are the set that I think about when I think about an unhappy year. About the principal at my new school refusing to let me be called by my nickname, so I was John instead of Jay in second grade. It was my parents arguing a lot. Neighbors calling the old man a city slicker. A neighbor threatening to shoot our Golden Retriever, Sam, who kept getting loose and getting into his yard. And then the same said neighbor actually shooting Sam in his leg.

1981 Donruss reminds me of a year where my family was so unhappy that, in the end, we had no recourse but to move back to Pittsburgh, not the city, but the suburbs, where I’d, yet again, be the new kid, all at the risk of my old man losing that bank job.

Which he did.

That’s the stuff I think about when I see 1981 Donruss. I guess it could’ve been Topps. Or it could’ve been 1981 Fleer, which I first saw and bought in a general store in Wellsburg, one morning when the old man was driving me to school. It just so happened that 1981 Donruss is what I opened during that car ride, so it bares the weight of that time in my life. This March, I was home visiting my folks and I came upon the 1981 Donruss set on the cheap at a flea market. Those memories actually propelled me to buy the set. To bring it back to Brooklyn and look through it from time to time. To write this. To try and find that seven-year-old kid who was going into the first real unknown of the many unknowns that he was going to face as he got older.

Thanks for reading! Happy Collecting!

            

 

2024 Topps Heritage and the Big Bamboozle

 

I’m late to the game.

            That’s been happing a lot to me lately.

            2024 Topps Heritage came out on April 10^th and I’m just getting around to it. There’s a story about that…but it’s not a long or very interesting one. Really, it came down to me wanting the authentic experience of buying my Hobby boxes in an actual sports card store as opposed to buying them online. That can present a problem being a card collector in NYC. There’s the lack of card stores. How spaced out the card stores are.

            Then there’s dealing with the subway.

            That said, this isn’t really a post about 2024 Topps Heritage.

            Although I like the cards.

            Even though I’m not a big 1975 design fan.

            I guess you had to be there.

            If this blog post has anything to do with 2024 Topps Heritage, it has to do with how Heritage helped me to finally (after 5 years back into collecting) see what kind of a collector I truly I am. Maybe not 2024 Topps Heritage directly.

            Honestly, I should just be thanking the Topps/Fanatics corporation in total. Through their actions they’re the ones who truly helped me figure it all out.

            And save some money along the way.

            To explain…we need to start here.

            Ah, 2023 Update. That magical time when Topps/Fanatics chose to go from 24 to 20 packs in a Hobby Box, and at the same time going from 14 to 12 cards per pack. 

            That choice was a “boon” for us folks who enjoy (enjoyed) building set from ripping open packs of cards. It took me a Hobby box, a Jumbo box and an order on SportLots to complete the 2023 Update set.

            Yeah.

            Flash forward to February 2024 and the release of 2024 Topps Series 1. Now, and I’ll be honest here, I fucking LOVE 2024 Topps’s design. It’s the best design for anything Topps has done since I got back into collecting, and looking back on all of the collecting years that I missed and the collecting years that I did experience (1980-1992); I honestly thinking 2024 Topps might ne one of my favorite designs ever. I had a Twitter (X whatever etc) post to the effect that I was going to buy a SHIT TON of these. Or something to that effect. And I did buy a shit-ton of 2024 Topps Series 1. Just not in the way that I imagined.

            Full disclosure: I purchased two Hobby boxes and one Jumbo box of 2024 Topps Series 1.

            That’s probably the most that I ever spent on a base release of product to rip.

            But I turned 50 this year…so…Happy Birthday to me, I guess.

            Here’s the funny thing though: two Hobby boxes and one Jumbo box later…and I still need 16 cards to complete my series 1 base set.

            Un-fucking-believable.

            Two Hobby boxes and one Jumbo box later…and I didn’t get a single Mitch Keller or Yordan Alvarez card.

            The Keller I bought via SportsLots and the Yordan I found in a Cooperstown card shop.

            What Topps/Fanatics seems to have done, aside from scaling back on packs and cards (in at least Hobby boxes) is also mess with the card collation. Since 2023 Update I’ve seen more doubles in single Hobby boxes/Jumbo boxes than I’ve experienced in five years back collecting cards. It’s hard enough putting a set together with less cards…but add a bunch of doubles.

            I mean this isn’t 1987, right?

            Ah, 1987...

            And what about 1987?

            Based on packs costing $.40 cents in 1987, a 36-pack Wax box of Topps retailed for, oh, let’s round up…$15.

            That’s approximately $42.00 in 2024 money.

            2024 Hobby boxes of Serries 1 run anywhere from $89.00 to $120 depending.

            Even with the bells and whistles inside the boxes, that’s on helluva mark-up from 1987.

            And judging by the angry Tweets I see from collectors on and shortly after new release day, it’s not a very fair mark-up.

            But I digress.

            When I got back into collecting, I accepted what the newer product cost. But with that, came the experience of not have to shell out a shit-ton of money to put together a 300-330 card base and/or update set. That’s not the same experience now. Just ask the 17 cards that I still need to complete 2024 Series 1.

            And what does any of this have to do with 2024 Heritage?

            And why am I thanking Topps/Fanatics?

            Well, I made my little 2024 Heritage wish come true. A couple of weeks ago I bought two Hobby boxes at an actual real live sports card store in Upper Manhattan. The next morning I got up with my iced coffee, my Grateful Dead, my checklist, and I began ripping packs and collating the cards to start building the 2024 Topps Heritage base set, even with the ugliness of the first 100 cards being this year’s short prints.

            And…

            Not counting the 85 short print cards, after two Hobby Boxes I still needed 120 of the base cards to collect to finish the base set.

            In previous years when I did the same thing, I maybe made a big SportLots purchase to finish off the base set.

            It was the doubles again.

            It’s great when one Hobby box yields two of these in one box

            Not so great at other times.

            Not slagging either player, but these are the doubles of them...from two Hobby Boxes..,I didn't even include their cards from the set I was trying to build.

            And I get it…less packs…shoddy collation…Topps/Fanatics wants collectors to spend more money on their product. They’re a corporation. This is America. I’m not going to fault their capitalist drive. It kind of puts a damper on a collector trying to build sets from packs. The same goes for trying to be short prints on the secondary market. Short prints average $1.50-$4.00 for common cards, with star cards costing more. When you need 70-80 short print cards on top of the base...well...yeah. While it might still be financially feasible for some collectors to build sets this way…it doesn’t seem fun. And the doubles just take up more space in the good ol’ card area.

            But, again, I’m not blaming and/or faulting Topps/Fanatics.

            And I'm not blaming collectors selling cards on the secondary market, trying to make back what you spent on the product.

            With this blog post…I’m actually thanking them.

            When I got back into collecting, I used to think that the cost of buying Hobby boxes necessitated that I build sets. As I've said here before, when I was a young collector, I was never a set builder. I PC’d players and collected Pittsburgh Pirates cards. I still do that. But now, taking into account all that I’ve written above; maintaining a select player (past and present PC), PC and my Pirates cards are going to be the sole focus of my collection. Not buying Hobby/Jumbo is going to free me up to build some Pirates team sets from the 1950s-1970s, and purchase some of the higher end cards for players that I PC. And that’s going to be the focus of this blog going forward.

            Topps releases a set every year after Series 2…so if I’m feeling completist I’ll just buy that.

            As for Heritage…

            I guess we’re breaking up again.

Thanks for reading! Happy collecting!