BUYING INTO FORMULA 1

By Russell Streur

 

Topps 2021 Formula 1, Card 1, Lewis Hamilton, 2021 Champion Driver.

 

I’ve always been a fan of Formula 1 racing.  Not always the biggest fan or the most committed fan, but ever since the early 1970s watching Jackie Stewart on the European courses on ABC’s Wide World of Sports, I’ve always paid at least some attention to it.

 

Even just the names conjure the speed and the art of the open cockpit sport.  The great Ferrari, McLaren and Williams teams of the 80s and 90s all the way to today’s Red Bull and Mercedes juggernauts.  And the drivers—some version of a more modern Top Ten, in no particular order except by chronology—Emerson Fittipaldi, Alain Prost, Niki Lauda, Nigel Mansell, the awful death of Aryton Senna, Damon Hill, the tragedy of Michael Schumacher, Sebastian Vettel, Lewis Hamilton, Max Verstappen.

 

Over last summer, I became a serious fan again, and in the autumn happily exchanged the punts, penalty flags and the point-after attempts of NFL afternoons for the hairpin turns, chicanes and grandstand straights of the international motordromes and street courses in the earlier Sunday time slot.

 

Formula 1 races are set to a length of about 190 miles.  Depending on the circuit, between 50 and 80 laps are run in about 90 minutes.  Races are capped by a two-hour limit.  Maximum speed is regulated at 360 km/hr (223.6 mph). Each course is unique and infinitely more exciting than the usual ovals of the Indy circuit or the endless laps of NASCAR, and so are the races themselves.  One last bonus—no commercials during the broadcast.  The season runs from March to November, and the winter lull is a fine time a look at the sport’s new trading cards.

 

Topps won rights to Formula 1 cards in 2020 and began full production in 2021.  There are five product lines:

 

·         Topps Now

·         Dynasty

·         Sapphire

·         Chrome

·         Flagship

 

Topps Now cards are issued under an order-as-you-go process, $9.99 per card, each available for a limited time, with the press run limited to the number of orders received.  The 2022 set wound up with 81 cards.  Though bundling discounts are available (three cards for $24.99 for example), a collector is still looking at a $700 minimum outlay for a season.

 

Topps Now 2022.

Card 079, Max Verstappen of Red Bull wins his 15^th race of the season.

 

Dynasty is a boxed pack of a single autographed relic card with a going price of around $2,000.  This is the luxury level and not collecting.  It’s speculation.

 

Dynasty, Lewis Hamilton

Image Source:  The Cardboard Connection

 

Sapphire is the high-end of three consumer product lines.  Count on spending a minimum of $350 for a hobby box that contains a total of 32 cards distributed in eight packs of four cards each. Scans don’t do any justice to Sapphires.  Printed on thick, full glossy stock, the cards are simply elegant. 

 

Sapphire Card 110, Kimi Raikkonen

Image Source:  LottiCards

 

Chrome is the mid-range set but it’s a pricy mid-range.  A hobby box containing a total of 64 costs around $200. Scans don’t do much justice to Chrome cards, either.  A high-quality product, just a notch below Sapphire.

 

  Chrome Card 102, the Aston-Martin AMR21 driven by Sebastian Vettel.

 

The Formula 1 Flagship line is the set-builder product. It sounds reasonable enough, 175 cards to the base checklist:

 

Cards 1 thru 57:                 F1 Drivers

Cards 58 thru 79:              F2 Drivers

Cards 80 thru 95:              Crew

Cards 96 thru 115:            F1 Cars

Cards 116 thru 137:         F2 Cars

Cards 138 thru 154:         Grand Prix Winners

Cards 155 thru 170:         Drivers of the Day

Cards 171 and 172:          F1 Award Winners

Cards 173 thru 175:         Rookies

 

A motivated collector might sensibly compute that a collection of this set size could be built from foil packs at a patient pace and a tolerable price.  But there are ten deliberate variations, and 138 inserts—Predators, Debriefs, Relics, Flags, Variations, and the Sports Cars of 1961 subset—and the production ratios to consider:

 

Variations 10 cards. 1 to 165 hobby packs.

Predators 15 cards. 1:6 hobby packs.

Debriefs 20 cards. 1:4.5 hobby packs.

Relics 38 cards, 1:36 hobby packs

Flags 30 cards. 1:9 hobby packs.

Sports Cars of 1961 25 cards. 1:4.5 hobby packs.



And the math becomes daunting and the cost prohibitive for the full collection. Completing the base set from buying hobby boxes of foil packs though, is certainly doable, if the collector will be content with whatever inserts come along the way and still be happy with the results. I’m that collector, and here’s what a set looks like.

 

Formula 1 Drivers.  To no surprise, the Formula 1 drivers are the star cards of the collection.  Ten teams compete in Formula 1, and each team fields two cars, so there are spots for 20 drivers.  Injuries or replacements will add two or three drivers to the roster standings each year.  Drivers are shown in formal, candid or helmeted poses.

Left to right:  Card 13, Pierre Gasly; Card 4, Sergio Perez.

 

Gasly won his first Formula 1 race in 2020 at the Italian Grand Prix.  Perez won his first Formula 1 race in 2020 at the Sakhir Grand Prix.

 

Top:  Card 43, Max Verstappen; bottom, Card 21, Valtteri Bottas.

 

Verstappen placed third in the 2020 driver standings and then finished first in 2021 and again in 2022.  Bottas finished second in driver rankings in 2020 and third in 2021 for Mercedes.  He currently drives for Alfa Romeo.

 

Left, Card 28, Daniel Ricciardo; right, Card 54, Carlos Sainz.

 

Ricciardo is a veteran driver and has served stints with Renault, McLaren and Red Bull teams.  Sainz has followed a similar path, with Red Bull, Renault, McLaren and Ferrari.

 

Formula 2 Drivers.  Eleven Formula 2 teams provide training and experience to prepare drivers for Formula 1.  Brazilian-born Felipe Drugovich won the 2022 Formula 2 championship.  Theo Pourchaire of France finished second in the standings. 

 

 

Left to right:  Card 60, Felipe Drugovich; Card 78, Theo Pourchaire.

 

Other drivers came from countries less closely associated with Formula 1 racing.  Guanyu Zhou of China finished in third-place in the 2021 F2 standings and currently drives with the Alfa Romeo team.  Jehan Daruvala of Mumbai, India, fell out of the Formula 2 circuit at the end of the 2022 season after failing to advance during a three-year window of opportunity.

 

Left to right: Card 61 Guanyu Zhou; Card 67, Jehan Daruvla.

 

 

Crew.   Crew cards will never be as popular as the drivers or the cars, but without the crews, there’d be no racing in the first place. 

 

The Mercedes brain trust:  left, Card 81, Toto Wolff, Team Principal; right, Card 80, James Allison, Technical Director.

 

Formula 1 Teams 2021.  In many ways, the Formula 1 Constructor’s Championship carries as much prestige as the driver’s championship.  Ferrari holds the most titles with 16, followed by Williams (9), McLaren (8), Mercedes (8), Lotus (7) and Red Bull (5).

The top three F1 teams of 2021.

Top to bottom:  Card 96, Mercedes Petronas, Lewis Hamilton, Driver; Card 98, Red Bull Honda, Max Verstappen, Driver; Card 107, Scuderia Ferrari, Carlos Sainz, Driver.

 

Formula 2 Teams 2021.  The Italian sports car manufacturer Dallara builds all of the Formula 2 machines.  For driver development, each is built to the same specifications.   The 2021 version features a V6, 3.4-liter, turbo-charged six-speed Mecachrome engine capable of reaching 620 horsepower and speeds up to 335 km/hour (208.159 mph).  The cars run on Pirelli tires with the wets and slicks specially configured for Formula 2.

 

 

The top three F2 teams of 2021.

Top to bottom:  Card 117, Preema Racing, Oscar Piastri, Driver;

Card 118 UNI-Virtuosi, Guanyu Zhou, driver; Card 124,Carlin, Dan Ticktum, Driver.

 

 

 

Grand Prix Winners. Lewis Hamilton won 11 of the 17 races run in 2020.  Other winners that year were Valtteri Bottas (2), Max Verstappen (2), Pierre Gasly and Sergio Perez.  Six drivers won races in 2021:  Max Verstappen (10), Lewis Hamilton (8) and Sergio Perez, Esteban Ocon, Daniel Ricciardo and Valtteri Bottas each with a single trophy.

 

 

Card 157, Winner Portuguese Grand Prix, Lewis Hamilton

 

 

Drivers of the Day.  Fans vote for the Driver of the Day in Formula 1 races.  On November 29, 2020, Romain Grosjean of the Haas team crashed at high speed into a safety barrier during the first lap of the Bahrain Grand Prix.  The impact split his car in half and ignited the fuel.  Grosjean was able to escape the fiery accident with foot and hand injuries and minor burns.  Fans delivered him the Driver of the Day award for his escape.  He is currently racing for Andretti Autosport on the Indy Car circuit.

 

 

Card 157, Driver of the Day Bahrain, Romain Grosjean

 

 

 

Award Winners.  Lewis Hamilton won his seventh world championship in 2020, tying him with Michael Schumacher for the most ever, and propelling the Mercedes team to a record seventh-straight constructor’s championship. 

 

 

The Hamilton Mercedes Combination. 

Top:  Card 171, Lewis Hamilton, champion driver; Card 172, Mercedes, champion constructor.

 

 

Rookie Cards.  With the field limited to ten teams running two cars, there’s not a lot of room for rookie drivers.  The now-dissolved Uralkali Haas team of 2021 fielded two:  Mick Schumacher and Nikita Mazepin.  The son of seven-time Formula 1 champion winner Michael Schumacher, Mick won the Formula 3 European championship in 2018 and the Formula 2 championship two years later.  He is now a reserve driver with the Mercedes team.  Nikita Mazepin is the son of Russian agricultural fertilizer mogul and Uralkali sponsor Dimitry Mazepin.  Haas severed ties with Uralkali and the Mazepins in March of 2022 following the elder Mazepin’s support of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.  Nikita no longer races in Formula 1.

Left to right:  Card 174, Mick Schumacher; Card 175, Nikita Mazepin.

 

Variations.  There are ten official variations.  The Card 9 versions of Fernando Alonso are shown below.

 

 

Card 9, Fernando Alonso, base (top); variation (bottom).

 

Predators Inserts.  Predator cards feature the top 15 drivers on the circuit.  Backs contain brief biographies of the drivers. 

Apex Predators, McLaren Team.

Left: AP-DR, Daniel Ricciardo; right:  AP-LN, Lando Norris.

 

 

Debrief Inserts.  These inserts pair drivers with team principals.

 

 

 

Top to bottom:  Card D-8, Sebastian Vettel and Otmar Szafnauer, Aston Martin;

Card D-13, Carlis Sainz and Matteo Binotto, Ferrari;

Card D-2, Estaban Ocon and Davide Brivio, Alpine.

                                                                               

 

 

Relics.  On average, relics are found once in every 36 hobby packs.

 

 

 

Daniel Ricciardo with Uniform Patch

Image Source: LottiCards

 

Flags of Foundation Inserts.  The nationalities of the drivers are recognized on these cards.  

 

 

 

 

 

Flags of Foundation

Top to bottom: FF-SV, Sebastian Vettel (Germany); FF-GR, George Russell (Great Britain);

FF-JV, Juri Vips (Estonia)

 

 

 

1961 Sports Cars of 1961.  These inserts mimic the Topps 1961 Sports Cars series.  The original cards measure an oversize 2.5” by 4.75”.

 

 

 

 

 

Sports Cars 1961

 Top:  1961 Topps Card 7, Maserati 5000 GT.

Bottom: T61-AG Antonio Giovanazzi, Alfa Romeo.

 

Blaster Box Foil Inserts.  Blaster boxes contain their own set of insert refractors.

 

Blaster Box Foil Inserts

Top:  Card 96, Lewis Hamilton and the Mercedes-AMG Petronas Team.

 Bottom: Card 61, Max Verstappen, Driver of the Day, Russian Grand Prix.

 

 

Parallels.  Checker Flag parallels are issued one per hobby pack.  Bordered parallel cards are produced in the following counts:

 

•                     Aqua / 199

•                     Blue / 99

•                     Gold / 50

•                     Orange / 25

•                     Black / 10

•                     Red / 5

 

Left to right:

Card 14, 23/50, Yuki Tsunoda; Card 69, 05/10, Juri Vips; Card 20, 038/199, Nicholas Latifi.

 

 

Card 46.   Sergio Perez wins the 2020 Sakhir Grand Prix for Red Bull Honda.

 

Podium.  I bought 456 cards building a base set from foil packs and a left-overs lot of commons.  239 were unique and 217 were duplicates.   Not a bad ratio.  Two last missing cards came from the singles market.  No complaints about the distribution of inserts and parallels.  Total cost, $322.18.  I’ve spent money in worse ways, that’s for sure. There wasn’t any big-ticket card in the packs I opened to objectively prove a dollar value but the buy and sell traffic is all on the higher shelves and in the grading anyway.  Collecting for the sake of collecting is measured in a different currency where the numbers only tell a small part of the story.

 

Bottom line, I’m satisfied, and I’d do it again, no regrets.

 

Will I collect the 2022 set?  No.  It’s a larger set, 200 cards this time around, and even though the extra 25 is a small number, small numbers add up.  But no mostly because there’s only so much to cover between driver, team and car, and 19 different cards of Max Verstappen and 17 different cards of Lewis Hamilton in the 2022 collection don’t give me a thrill. 

 

So, a pass on the 2022 set, also no regrets.

 

The 2023 season starts Sunday.   Time to see if anybody can catch those Red Bulls this year.

 

Except where noted, all images from the author’s collection.

 

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.