This is it, the year all of our suffering has been leading to. 2015, the year the Mets will finally win! Or at least that was the plan. With some serious questions and a lot of the expected improvement coming in the form of returning or rebounding players, the 2015 Mets aren’t exactly inspiring confidence beyond maybe being in the hunt for a second Wild Card spot, or at least a winning record. 82 wins or bust!
It’s hard to believe that it’s March already. And this piece is two months late… Between Topps and Panini releasing products right down to the wire, chasing down cards, and chasing down answers, it took me longer than expected to get this the way I wanted it. 2014 brought us the first cards, first autographs, and first memorabilia from the first Mets player to win the Rookie of the Year award in 30 years. It also brought us the last autograph card from the first person ever to wear a Mets uniform.
With all of the cards released across dozens of products in 2014, it can be hard to figure out what is worth collecting and what might as well be forgotten. What makes something essential? It’s a mix of collectibility, notability, and attainability. Popular brands/inserts and autograph debuts will dominate here, not big money low-numbered parallels or big stars. Just about everything mentioned here should still be fairly easy to find on the secondary market at reasonable prices.
Now in the second year of the post-black era, the Mets memorabilia offerings in 2014 were a bit more colorful than they’ve been in the past. Color has been hard to find recently, but new blue and orange jerseys and a renewed focus on pinstripes at home helped to turn things around. It was looking like a great year for memorabilia until the black came back courtesy of Panini. The plague of “event-worn” memorabilia has now spread to baseball.
Part of the Donruss legacy from the Playoff years was innovation and diversity in memorabilia. To date though, Panini has been a bit inconsistent in its memorabilia releases. This fall, Panini brought the Immaculate Collection brand to baseball and brought with it some of what made Playoff/Donruss great. It also brought some of what has become controversial in the hobby and, until now, has been largely unseen in baseball products.
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Back in 1991, the hobby was starting to respond to Upper Deck’s new quality standard and the growing demand for premium cards. Topps set a new standard with 1991 Stadium Club, one-upping Upper Deck with full-bleed photography and a new take on stats on the back. While 1991 Topps was still mired in the past, Stadium Club was the future. Two years later though, Upper Deck brought full-bleed photography to its base product while, along with Topps Finest and Fleer Flair, its new SP product helped to define the super premium category. Stadium Club meanwhile had grown stale and gimmicky, sticking around for another decade despite having been made redundant by an era of premium escalation that it had helped to usher in.
The Stadium Club brand would appear only briefly over the next decade with baseball, basketball, and football products in 2008 and a Triumvirate insert set in 2013 Archives. In 2014 though, Topps resurrected the brand that had been irrelevant for 20 years and tried to breathe new life into it. They just didn’t try very hard.
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