Pissing Away Beckett's Credibilty, One Tweet at a Time.

Some things just have to be said.  Even if they are unpleasant to say, and even if such unpleasantries are uncomfortable to write, you just have to suck-up and do what needs to be done.  So, let me take a deep breath.

(SIGH!)

OK then, here we go.

Over the last 24 hours, Chris Olds has managed to piss away about three buckets and a dram full of credibility.  (For those of you not familiar with the British Imperial measurement system, three buckets and a dram works out to about two shitloads and a pint, or just under forty liters.)  How you ask? It all started innocuously enough with this Tweet.

My Topps Archives base set is complete. Now just 23 SPs short.
— Chris Olds (@chrisolds2009) June 9, 2012

And it all degenerated from there.

I won't reprint the complete series between Olds and myself, The Cardboard Junkie, Those Back Pages, Long Fly Ball To Because..., and others, I'd be here all day if I did.  If you want to see all the fallacious arguments, pretzel logic, red herrings and attempted changing of subjects, you're just going to have to look for them yourselves.

All I'll say is, if the Editor of Beckett Baseball and Beckett Sports Card Monthly honestly believes that a full 241-card base set of 2012 Topps Archives is "complete" at only 200 cards and doesn't include the Bryce Harper RC, then we're all fucked.

(OBTW, if you're not following me on The Twinkah, why not?)

I Do Not Run Marathons

Have you ever run a marathon?  Why not?  Twenty-six point two miles over varying terrain for a couple of hours can't be that hard?  The Boston and New York Marathons attract thousands of runners, so it must be easy, right?  I have my reasons for not running (I'm out of shape and with a set of knees that have been completely destroyed by years of soccer.  Besides, if was ever stupid enough to try, I'd keel over in exhaustion about five miles in.), but what's your excuse?

If you're like most people, you don't run marathons because you know you'll never, ever, be able to finish it -- at least not in a reasonable time.  What's the point in starting something you know you'll never complete?

This brings me to 2012 Topps Archives Baseball.  By all outward appearances, this should be an awesome product, and the kind of set I'd be buying by the pallet-load -- if I had the money, that is.  Under ordinary circumstances, this could be a legitimate "Product of the Decade" contender (and that's a "shoot.")

It could be, but it's not.  And you can all put the blame on one card.  This one...  

 

It's not that Topps included a Harper RC -- personally, I think it's great that Topps was able to add him at the last minute.  No, it's the way they went about it: a super short-printed base card.

Topps could have easily printed enough Harper's to make it both attainable and realistic to complete a full 241-card set.  They made Yu Darvish and Yoenis Cespedes regular ol' base cards, and that hasn't hurt their "value" (whatever that means), why didn't they do the same with Harper?  Heck, they could have printed enough to equal the production of the other 40 All-Time Fan Favorties SPs (cards #201-#240).  

But Topps chose NOT to.  They could have made it a one-per-sixth box hit, but instead they made it a one-per-sixth case hit.  In other words, they gimmicked the shit out of it.

(Keep in mind, we're not talking about an Autographed Bowman Chrome Prospect Lavender/Fuschia Die-Cut Nuke-Fractor serial-numbered to 99; the Harper in question is a base card in a base-level product.)

This is what the current regime at Topps fails to understand about collectors.  We don't want to run marathons, we just want to collect baseball cards.  Topps didn't need to make 2012 Topps Archives Baseball a marathon, but they chose to anyway.  

We bother collecting a set you'll never be able to complete?

Top 10 National Pick-Ups: #9. The case of the mysterious rookie reprints.

#9: Three 2001 Topps Archives Future Rookie Reprints.

Given to me, for free, by Chris Thomas.

2001 Topps Archives is a set that I'm trying to piece together for about 10 years now. For the uninitiated, Archives was a 450-card set the featured the rookie (Series One) and final (Series Two) cards of over 200 retired players with a smattering of All-Star and League Leader cards thrown-in for good measure. The set is, unfortunately, best remembered for the unbelievably small text used to designate each cards sequential number. I guess Topps wanted to keep the backs of each card as authentic as possible, and didn't want to renumber the entire set.

But trying to figure out what the card number required high-powered magnification. For example, the Archives card of Carl Yastrzemski's 1983 Topps card is #175 in the set. However, if you flip to the back the card number is listed as 550 -- which was Yaz's card number in the '83 Topps set. Only when you look at the bottom, in incredibly small type do you see this: "TOPPS REPRINT 175 of 450." In other words, it can be a real pain-in-the-ass to try and collect this set, and this rather confusing numbering system makes trades next to impossible.

I bought a box of each series when it first came out, but haven't seen any boxes for sale since. Dave & Adams has a box of Series Two for $103.50 -- but that probably has more to do with the fact that you get one on-card autograph of a retired player in each box. (Did I mention that each 20-pack Hobby box yielded an on-card autograph?) So, much like my 1992 Bowman and 1993 Finest sets, I'm piecing this one card-by-card.

So imagine my surprise when, thumbing through a box of cards at Chris Thomas's house, I found these three cards.



Hmmm... I didn't know Topps included active players in the '01 Archives set. I flipped the back to check the card number and found this on the back of the Johnson: "TOPPS REPRINT 13 OF 20."

13 of 20? WTF?

So obviously, these aren't from the 2001 Topps Archives set. But they all have the 2001 Topps Archives logo on them. So what the fuck are they?

It turns out these three cards are part of a 20-card set known as the "2001 Topps Archives Future Rookie Reprints;" and you got a pack of five in each Topps Limited Factory Set. The checklist features all the usual suspects such as an '87 Barry Bonds, '93 Jeter, '92 ManRam, '91 Chipper Jones, and an '82 Ripken with those other two guys cropped out. The checklist also has rookie reprints of some players that didn't exactly pan out such as a '96 Geoff Jenkins, '95 Jay Payton, and a '92 of Calvin "Pokey" Reese. They all can't be winners, but all-in-all, a pretty decent representation of the top 20 Topps rookies of players who were active in 2001.

Now I mentioned that these cards were randomly inserted into each Topps Limited factory set, as opposed to the regular factory set. For their 50th Anniversary Topps brought back the concept of the Tiffany set with Topps Limited. Distributed exclusively to HTA dealers, Topps Limited was a "high-end" version of the 790-card 2001 Topps set. Since premium cardstock and glossy coating had become industry-standard, each base card was printed on a thicker-than-normal 20-point cardstock. In addition, each card was stamped with an HTA logo and the entire set was packaged in a shrink-wrapped wooden box.

Topps originally announced that only 5000 Limited sets would be produced, but wound-up only printing 3805 sets. Assuming that all 20 cards in the Archives Future Rookie Reprint set was distributed in equal quantities, only about 950 copies of each card were produced. And since these cards were only available in an obscure factory set, good luck trying to find singles of these.

#10: It's for "Members Only"
#9: The case of the mysterious rookie reprints
#8: 75 for 25
#7: A point is a point
#6: OH NOEZ!!!!!
#5: What do they know about partying? Or anything else?
#4: Epix Mo-Jo!!!
#3: Satisfyin' the ladies, one printin' plate at a time
#2: The Mother of all junk waxboxes
#1: Ironic ain't just the name of an Alanis Morrisette song

The Stale Gum Box Break Archive.

Over the years, I had thought I lost all my pre-blogger box breaks forever. Then I discovered something called the Internet Wayback Machine, which has been archiving other websites. So to whoever started up the Internet Wayback Machine, THANK YOU FOR SAVING EVERYTHING!

http://web.archive.org/web/20010801192515/stalegum.com/coll/coll.asp

If you have any spare time, check it out. See what this site looked like seven years ago (yes, that is supposed to look like 1987 Donruss), or see just how awful my writing skills were before I went back to college.