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Product Spotlight: 2014 Topps Gypsy Queen

Posted by on 12 May 2014 Comments Off on Product Spotlight: 2014 Topps Gypsy Queen

Some good, some bad, and some ugly photographs

Gypsy Queen just isn’t my kind of product.  I’ve never been a fan of tobacco style products, though I can understand the appeal considering the popularity of that era among hardcore collectors.  At least you can get proper toploaders and binder pages for the tobacco size minis, unlike most of the other minis that are plaguing the industry.  And yet, even though I have no interest in building a set of these, I always find myself with at least the Mets autographs and relics plus a base team set.  There’s just something about the distinct simplicity that makes Gypsy Queen stand out.

Card Design

The formula for a Queen Design is pretty simple.  Take some earth tones, add some fancy frame squiggles, and slap a big Gypsy Queen logo on it.  This year’s version is similar to the 2012 design, which is a bit of an improvement over last year’s overly busy look.  I’m not a fan of the heavy use of filters to give the photographs a vintage painting look.  It’s not as bad as whatever went wrong with this year’s Turkey Red, but it looks less “vintage artwork” than “Hey look at this cool Photoshop filter I found!” to me.

Mets Selection

Overall, 8 cards is a bit below average for a 350-card set, but the split between base and short prints is even more off.  Only five Mets made the 300-card base set: Rookies Wilmer Flores and Travis d’Arnaud, Daniel Murphy, and newcomers Curtis Granderson and Bartolo Colon.  Three Mets are among the 50 short prints: Matt Harvey, Zack Wheeler, and David Wright.  While it is strange to see all of the stars missing from the base set and loaded into the short prints, it’s another absence that is most notable – retired players.  Gypsy Queen is loaded with retired stars, more than 50 in total, but none of them are Mets.  This is the first year without Tom Seaver in the base set, though you could just make your own by cutting out a 2014 Gypsy Queen frame and slapping the Seaver picture they use every year into it.  If you were hoping for a full set of identical-photo Seaver Gypsy Queen cards, that’s the only way you’ll get it.

Parallels

100 of the 300 full-sized base cards have blue (numbered to 499) and white (retail exclusive) framed parallels.  Flores, d’Arnaud, and Granderson made the list here.  These are always some of the nicest cards in Gypsy Queen and they’re common enough to be easy to obtain.  On the mini side, all 350 mini cards have a full range of parallels including black (numbered to 199), red (numbered to 99), and sepia (numbered to 50).  Despite the low numbering, many of these carry little or no premium.

Inserts

Two inserts is actually pretty good for Gypsy Queen.  Seaver shows up here, though I’m not liking the sepia treatment of the overly filtered photos.  These would probably look more vintage without the filtering.  At least it’s not the usual Gypsy Queen Seaver photo.

Variants

Matt Harvey and David Wright have all of the photo variants this time around.  The full-sized cards get reverse negative variants (with different photos from the base cards to begin with…) and the minis get the usual photo variants that end up being far more common than the regular versions.

Relics

2014 continues the decline of Mets base relics in Gypsy Queen.  After having four in 2012 and three in 2013, we’re left with just two this year, one full-size and one mini.  And neither features a photograph that comes close to matching the material.  Wheeler’s shows him in home pinstripes, but the material is from last year’s orange Los Mets jersey.  Gee’s material is from his home white jersey, but the photo shows him in, um, black?  Gee hasn’t worn a black jersey in a game since 2011, making the photo more than two years old.  Apparently getting material from last year is easier than getting photos from the last two years…  The Gee also has patch variants numbered to 10 and 5.  Matt Harvey is the lone Met in the jumbo patch relics (numbered to 50 or less), though most of these do not feature patches as the name implies.

Autographs

On the other hand, this year’s Gypsy Queen doubles the total number of Mets Gypsy Queen autographs that have been made.  The first three years of Gypsy Queen gave us autographs from Angel Pagan, Jon Niese, R.A. Dickey, Jeurys Familia, and Kirk Nieuwenhuis.  2014 Gypsy Queen features the first certified autograph card from Jeremy Hefner, RC autographs from Travis d’Arnaud and Wilmer Flores, and autographs from David Wright and Zack Wheeler.  Interestingly, the RC logo is on the d’Arnaud and Flores autographs after being absent on rookie autographs in previous years, proving that nobody has any clue what a Rookie Card is these days.  Parallels include red (numbered to 49), gold (numbered to 25), green (numbered to 10), and purple (numbered to 1).  Wright and Wheeler also have mini autographs (numbered to 10) and autographed relics (numbered to 25).

Verdict

Mixed bag.  On the one hand, the autograph checklist would be good for just about any product and there are a reasonable number of easily obtainable parallels and variants to chase.  On the other, the lack of retired players in the base checklist (even just another Seaver with the infinitely-recycled photo) and relics that are little more than filler (the orange Wheeler jersey has gotten a lot of use so far this year…) leave considerable room for improvement.  ‘Unbalanced’ might be the best word to use to describe this year’s Gypsy Queen from a Mets perspective.

Redemption Frustration

Posted by on 3 March 2014 Comments Off on Redemption Frustration

A Game of Cardboard Roulette

It’s what every collector hopes for. You open a pack and there’s a card that stands out from the rest. It isn’t like the others, so it must be something good. You pull it out and you’re hit with immediate disappointment when you see that the back looks like one of these:

You’ve hit a redemption card. Maybe it’s something good, maybe it’s junk. One thing’s for sure: you won’t be seeing the card for a while, if ever. Redemptions can help to get better cards into products, but they have become so prevalent in recent years that collectors have come to dread the prospect of dealing with yet another one. It seems like everyone has at least one outstanding redemption; some people have hundreds stuck in Pending limbo. If it’s a minor card you really want, it doesn’t hurt much to wait. But what do you do if you pull something like this?

Now you’re left with quite the conundrum. Do you redeem it and wait? Sell it now and let someone else deal with it? Will the price go down in the meantime or will the live card be worth more? Why do the card companies do this to us anyway? Let’s break down something we’ve been dealing with since the turn of the millennium but have yet to truly come to terms with.

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Best Mets Cards of 2013

Posted by on 6 January 2014 Comments Off on Best Mets Cards of 2013

Pitching dominates this year’s awards

It’s 2014, which means I’m running a bit behind on my 2013 wrap-up articles. The last few posts have covered most of the interesting cards from the last year, so now it’s time to narrow things down to just the best of the best so you don’t have to dig through 5,000 words for just the few things you’re interested in. Only 1,800 words…

Best Manufactured Material

2013 Topps Series 2 Tom Seaver Proven Mettle Coin

Not much has improved in this category since last year, so this award goes to a Seaver coin again. At least there was more player diversity this year and it wasn’t just all Seaver all the time.

Worst Manufactured Material

2013 Topps Pro Debut Travis d’Arnaud Hat Logo Patch

So many things are going on here, all of them wrong. Wrong team, wrong logo, wrong, wrong, wrong. I don’t know what Topps was going for with this one, but it sure wasn’t anything that made sense.

Best Parallel Insert Set

2013 Topps Archives Orange Parallel

Last year, I went with the Archives gold parallel here. This year, Topps changed the formula and the gold parallel just didn’t look that good. The orange parallel on the other hand was something unique among the multitudes of parallels released in 2013. Available only one per pack in 25 cent Archives packs at participating hobby shops, these cards fluoresce in UV light. Unfortunately, I didn’t pull a single Met out of more than 100 packs and had to go to eBay for these…

Best Base Insert

2013 Bowman Inception Jose Reyes Sapphire Reprint

With parallels, autographs, game-used, and manufactured material accounting for most of the inserts out there, it can be hard to find contenders for this category. I found three: the Jose Reyes sapphire rookie reprint from Bowman Inception, the Tom Seaver Cut to the Chase die-cut chrome insert from Topps Series 2, and the Matt Harvey Prodigies die-cut refractor from Topps Finest. I’ll give Reyes the edge here, though it should be noted that a David Wright version could be found in Bowman Sterling (the Reyes looks better).

Best Rookie Card

2013 Panini Prizm Scott Rice

Five Mets had Rookie Cards in 2013: Jeurys Familia, Collin McHugh, Zack Wheeler, Scott Rice, and Juan Lagares. All of them had at least a Rookie Card (and all of the standard parallels) in base Topps except for Scott Rice. After 14 years in professional baseball, Rice made his MLB debut with the Mets in 2013 and received Rookie Cards in just 2013 Panini Prizm.

Best Sticker Autograph

2013 Topps Opening Day Mr. Met Mascot Autograph

An autograph from the best sports mascot ever? Nothing else even comes close.

Best On-Card Autograph

2011 Bowman Platinum Matt Harvey

How does a card from 2011 Bowman Platinum qualify for the 2013 awards? Well, when it takes two full years for the cards to just be signed, you can’t really call these 2011 autograph cards. Harvey autographs were some of the hottest cards released this year and none were dated 2013. It’s been a strange year.

If you insist on having autographs from the actual 2013 product year in this category, here are a few worth noting.  Shown here are the first Mets autographs from Travis d’Arnaud and Noah Syndergaard, the last Mets autograph from R.A. Dickey, and an autograph on a thick slab of clear plastic.

Worst Autograph

2013 Topps Series 2 Collin Cowgill Chasing History Autograph

Sticker autograph, photoshopped black jersey, player who was traded shortly after the card was released. And then Topps made a second attempt in Topps Update that at least fixed the jersey issue. This card has no reason to exist.

Best Uniform Memorabilia Card

2013 Topps Tier One Matt Harvey
2013 Topps Triple Threads Jeurys Familia
2013 Topps Five Star David Wright Jumbo Jersey (blue jersey variant)

Technically, this should probably go to the 2013 Topps Triple Threads Harvey/Wright/Wheeler triple jersey card, but that was out of my price range. Instead, have a bunch of blue jerseys. Except for the Wright, which I haven’t been able to get yet…

Best Patch Card

2012 Panini National Treasures Matt Harvey

Depending on the variant, this one could qualify for best jersey or patch. Either way, this is one of those cards that was a must-have regardless of the price before Harvey’s card prices went through the roof. Because now you sure can’t afford it.

Best Bat Card

2013 Topps Triple Threads R.A. Dickey

Bat cards just aren’t very common anymore. This year, the only Mets bat card worthy of this award isn’t a Mets bat card at all. R.A. Dickey’s first bat cards came after all of his cards had been changed over to the Blue Jays, but I’ll let that slide.

Worst Memorabilia Card

2013 Topps Triple Threads Kirk Nieuwenhuis

Poor Kirk Nieuwenhuis. After being all over 2012’s autograph and memorabilia cards, he found himself with very little MLB playing time in 2013 and far too many cards. He got September off after the AAA season ended and then had loads of memorabilia cards in Triple Threads. After already having triple jersey autograph cards in last year’s Triple Threads. As if the unnecessary Future Phenoms card weren’t enough, Nieuwenhuis had three single jersey autograph cards. The green jersey cards I can see, but everything else is just filler. I suppose it isn’t really fair to single out Kirk when so much of Triple Threads was unnecessary filler, but the award has to go to someone.

Best Hobby Shop Promotion

Panini Black Friday

Every year, card companies try to find ways to get people to visit their local hobby shops. 2013 was filled with various promotions, from the Topps Series 1 Spring Fever redemption packs to Panini’s Boxing Day packs. Topps Archives had the most with vintage card redemptions, 25 cent packs, and ’80s card redemption packs with Topps Series 2 base, blue sparkle, and silver slate parallels. The best of the bunch, as usual, was Panini’s Black Friday promotion that combines discounts on Panini products with bonus packs containing cards featuring some of the hottest players in four sports with parallels, autographs, and unique memorabilia. Matt Harvey was the lone Met featured in this promotion.

Best New Product

2013 Bowman Inception

Coming into 2013, I thought the last thing the hobby needed was another Bowman product. With five Bowman products on the market already, what more was there to cover? Bowman Inception brought premium thick autograph cards and no filler. All on-card autographs, no chipping problems, no base cards, and no chrome. In other words, something different. Travis d’Arnaud and Jeurys Familia are the only two Mets in the base autograph sets, about average for the 62 total cards between the rookie and prospect autographs. As an added bonus, Jose Reyes was also among the sapphire reprints in this product.

Most Improved Product

2013 Bowman Sterling

Elsewhere in the Bowman franchise, Sterling was in sorry shape in 2012. With some of the most boring and uninspired autograph cards on the market and little else going for it, Bowman Sterling was a product without a purpose. For 2013, Sterling kept much of the same structure as the previous year’s product with a few key changes. Autograph orientation switched from landscape to portrait, a minor change that greatly improved the design. Other design changes improved how the base cards scanned to the point that the signatures no longer blended into the background. The biggest change though was with the refractor parallels. 2012 Bowman Sterling had six refractor parallels and none between base refractors (numbered to 199) and gold refractors (numbered to 50). The 2013 edition reduced the numbering on base refractors (now numbered to 150) and added three tiers above gold: green (numbered to 125), ruby (numbered to 99), and orange (numbered to 75). Canary diamond print runs were also increased from 1 to 3 and 1/1 superfractors were added. On top of that, the autograph checklist was increased from 88 to 106 with the Mets representation including the first certified autographs from L.J. Mazzilli and the first Mets autographs from Noah Syndergaard. More players and more parallels with a better design made 2013 Bowman Sterling a welcome improvement over last year’s afterthought.

Most Disappointing Product

2013 Panini Hometown Heroes

I’m tempted here to go with 2013 Topps Finest, but at this point I have no expectations for a product with lots of history and no real direction. Panini Hometown Heroes on the other hand was a new product that promised a new take on the formula that brought us Topps Archives and Leaf Memories. What it delivered was a bland design filled with autographs that have been done better by Topps over the last two years. While it did bring a few new or hard-to-find autographs, the design deficiencies made it hard to get excited about any of them.

Autograph Product of the Year

2013 Topps Archives

No surprises here. With 15 former Mets in the Fan Favorites Autographs set, including 8 shown as Mets (and the first autographs from Keith Miller), nothing else comes close. What’s even more impressive is that Topps featured an entirely new group of autographs in the second year of the new incarnation of Archives, for a total of 32 former Mets (15 shown as Mets) over two years of Fan Favorites Autographs. That’s still well under ten percent of the former Mets with certified autograph cards, so there’s plenty of room for next year’s Archives to keep the streak going.

Honorable Mention

2013 Leaf Memories

Leaf is no slouch in the autograph department and Leaf Memories combines 1990-style autographs from their three prospects, Rafael Montero, Domingo Tapia, and Dominic Smith, with buyback autographs from players from the 1980s and early 1990s. Among the buyback autographs are the first from Kevin Elster and Rick Aguilera, plus countless favorites from some of the best Mets teams in recent memory. Well, relatively recent at least. The large number of redemption cards though keeps Leaf Memories from threatening to dethrone Archives.

Game-Used Product of the Year

2013 Topps Museum Collection

Now in its third year (though only its second under the Museum Collection brand), some of the shine is beginning to wear off Topps Museum Collection. It has all of the memorabilia variety we’ve come to expect: jumbo jersey and bat relics, autographed memorabilia cards, quad relics, four-player relics, etc. This year, the highlights were jumbo bat cards from Darryl Strawberry, autographed double and triple memorabilia cards from R.A. Dickey, and jumbo Matt Harvey jersey cards. Jumbo jerseys from Johan Santana and Ike Davis weren’t quite as exciting and the usual assortment from David Wright seemed like a repeat of last year. Still, this year’s cards sold better than last year’s counterparts, which may be why I wasn’t quite as interested in them this year.

Honorable Mention

2012 Panini National Treasures

As usual, nothing could match the quality and player/material diversity of Museum Collection. Panini made a good showing though with 2012 Panini National Treasures. With autographed jersey and patch cards from Dwight Gooden, David Wright, Matt Harvey, and Kirk Nieuwenhuis, plus various booklets featuring Tom Seaver, Gary Carter, and David Wright and plenty of other former Mets like Duke Snider, Richie Ashburn, Keith Hernandez, and Jose Reyes featured in the other memorabilia sets, it should be obvious why National Treasures was a big hit.

2013 Biggest Pulls

Posted by on 20 December 2013 Comments Off on 2013 Biggest Pulls

The big hits get fewer and the small hits get bigger

With another year of baseball products in the books, it’s time to look back and ask one important question.  Why the heck do I keep doing this?  Like last year, I purchased a little more than $3,000 worth of hobby boxes and retail packs and sold about half that in single cards from those boxes and packs.  There were surprises, disappointments, oddities, and a few more disappointments.  Nothing here is from a premium product, just ordinary sub-$100 boxes of mostly base products.  What follows are the best cards I pulled from packs in 2013.  For some perspective, take a look at what Brent Williams pulled from 64 cases of 2013 Topps Update.  With more than 10 times as much product as I opened all year, his results may surprise you.

1. 2013 Bowman Byron Buxton Blue Wave Refractor Autograph BCP-BB 02/50
$394.77

The story behind this card is a long and sordid tale of high hopes, unfulfilled desires, crushing reality, twists of fate, and unexpected riches.  A screenplay will certainly be forthcoming; film rights are still available.  Way back in the early months of the year, 2013 Bowman was released with the promise of wrapper redemption Blue Wave Refractor packs.  Last year’s promotion proved to be quite popular, so getting the wrappers to Topps in less than a week was essential.  I had not yet decided whether to buy any boxes of this year’s Bowman, but I knew that I wanted to get in on the wrapper redemption.  A solution appeared in the form of case breaker extraordinaire Brent Williams, who was selling wrappers for a price that was too good to resist.  And so I purchased the household limit in wrappers, to be shipped directly to Topps for maximum efficiency.  One day after the product was released, the wrappers began their journey back to their maker.

The following day, I finally broke down and purchased the bare minimum amount of product necessary to assemble a complete base and chrome set.  Collation was on my side and I was left just a few cards short of my goal.  Little else came from those packs beyond an Alen Hanson refractor autograph that accounted for half of my total sales of unwanted inserts.  My change of heart also left me with enough wrappers to redeem for two packs, assuming that there was still time.  Already at my household limit, I sent in these wrappers with my brother’s house as the destination for anything that should be sent in return.  Now three days after product launch, the chance of any return was getting slimmer.  I may have already missed the window.

On the following Monday, launch plus five days, Topps announced that they had already received a mountain of wrappers and would shortly run out of packs to issue in exchange.  They urged customers to stop sending wrappers as those already in transit would surely exhaust their supply.  The outlook for my late travelers was grim, but those were not essential to my plan.  At worst, I could still look forward to receiving ten shiny foil packs in the mail.  Tracking information showed that my wrappers had indeed reached their destination, though they arrived on Tuesday, five full days after being shipped.  Even some of the wrappers shipped at the same exact time as mine arrived a day earlier.  This was not an encouraging development.

Within days, reports began appearing of people receiving a number of packs that did not match the number they should have been due.  People who sent in wrappers for ten packs instead received only two, while some who sent in for two received ten.  One person even reported receiving ten packs despite not having sent in a single wrapper.  I was getting worried as the days turned to weeks and no shipments from Topps appeared in my mailbox.

Eventually, I had to accept reality.  My packs would not be coming.  Not twelve, not ten, not even two.  My fate was to receive nothing.

Several months later, with this loss long behind me, I was visiting with my brother and handed him something or other of little importance that I had remembered to bring for him.  He went off to deposit what I had given him and came back with two foil packs for me.  Those packs that I had given up on when the ten that should have been assured failed to arrive were now in my hands.

At this point, the opportunity to maximize the return for these cards was long gone.  I already had all of the Mets that I wanted from these packs, so there was nothing inside for my collection.  These were now a mere curiosity and little more.  Still, I had to see what was inside.  The first pack held nothing of any consequence.  With expectations as low as they could be, I opened the second pack and saw the glint of a gold serial number on the bottom card.  Was it a Red Wave Refractor?  No, those are numbered to 25, this one was numbered to 50.  That means it’s an autograph.  Anybody good?  I checked the name and it said Byron Buxton.  Flipping it over confirmed what the back had told me – I was holding a Byron Buxton autograph card.

As it turned out, this particular Byron Buxton autograph card was one of the best ones to have.  Similar Buxton autos numbered to 50 in other products were selling for a respectable $150, but his Bowman Chrome autographs were selling for hundreds of dollars.  The timing was also quite fortunate as Buxton was at the top of everyone’s prospect list at the end of the 2013 minor league season.  This card had been selling for up to $550 at the time I pulled it.  My luck had certainly turned around.

In the end, this card sold for just under $400.  I had hoped for more, but the market was softening and the card had a slightly dinged corner.  This one card made back everything I had spent on 2013 Bowman including the 100 wrappers that never bore fruit.

2. 2013 Panini Prizm Draft Gosuke Katoh Prospect Signatures Red Refractor 53 020/100
$91.00

It was a long way down from that one big hit.  Last year, I pulled two cards that sold for more than $200 and nothing else that sold over $50.  This year, it was just the one card at just under $400 and nothing else over $100.  This particular card was the result of a Black Friday splurge designed to help me get my hands on a few Panini Black Friday packs (which themselves held the Puig Lava Flow card shown further down).  Two boxes of 2013 Panini Prizm Perennial Draft Picks yielded six cards numbered to 100, two of them autographs.  Of the six, three (including one of the autographs) sold for 99 cents and two didn’t sell.  And then there’s this Gosuke Katoh autograph that sold for $91 to someone in Japan.  It was a nice surprise in a product filled with underwhelming cards.

3. 2013 Topps Heritage High Number Manny Machado Real One Autograph ROA-MM
$75.00

I screwed this one up.  After last year’s Heritage High Number set was a big hit, I couldn’t pass up this year’s version.  Topps anticipated the surge in demand and increased production by nearly an order of magnitude while keeping the price steady at $100.  That should have been a recipe for crushing disappointment.  When I finally got my set (FedEx delivered it a day late after faking a delivery attempt in their tracking system, damn liars), it did not in fact hold the Zack Wheeler autograph I was hoping for.  Instead, I had to settle for Manny Machado.  The problem here was figuring out pricing.  With so many autographs released in 2013, pricing Machado’s cards is not easy.  Some low-numbered autos sell for $50, while other less limited autos sell for well over $100.  The sweet spot seemed to be in the $75-80 range, so I set a $75 Buy It Now price to avoid falling into the $50 basement or having other sellers undercut me with 1-day auctions.  And it sold in minutes while the next one to sell went for over $100.  Instead of getting my base set for free, I only got a good deal on it.  Oh well.  In my defense, the signature isn’t all that great and the corners were banged up from being at the outside of the stack in the box.  Topps should know better than to put the most valuable card in the most vulnerable spot.

4. 2013 Topps Archives Manny Machado Gold Rainbow 27 041/199 RC
$60.00

At least the Machado autograph sold for more than either of the Machado parallel cards featured here.  After the blue sparkle Machado (see below) from my Topps Series 1 wrapper redemption packs sold for nearly $30, I was expecting a similar price for the Archives gold foil parallel numbered to 199 (similar to the blue sparkle print run).  $60 was a complete shock and sent it to the top of my Archives sales, ahead of a Roy Halladay printing plate and card #7 on this list.

5. 2013 Bowman Chrome Derek Jeter Gold Refractor 215 44/50
$54.88

Yankees Bowman Chrome gold refractors seem to find me every year.  Last year, it was Ichiro.  This year, I hit the broken down aging Yankee jackpot with Jeter.  Comparable cards were selling for $40-60, so I set a $50 Buy It Now and hoped for the best.  Someone thought they knew better though and tried to get a bargain.  So $50 turned into $54.88.

6. 2013 Topps Series 2 Tom Seaver Proven Mettle Coin Wrought Iron PMC-TS 25/50
$50 (Estimated)

Topps Series 2 was nothing short of a colossal bust for me.  Four jumbo boxes yielded one jersey card I could sell, three I couldn’t, one autograph I chose to keep, three I couldn’t give away, three manufactured material cards that brought in about $25, and this.  With a going price of about $50 at the time I pulled it, this is the most valuable card I kept from a pack this year and the most valuable Mets card I have ever pulled from a pack.  These coins are some of the best manufactured material Topps has ever produced.  But this card is small consolation for an otherwise awful experience.

7. 2013 Topps Archives Tommy Lee Heavy Metal Autograph HMA-TL
$38.99

Topps Archives throws in a few non-baseball items from time to time.  This year, it was autographs from heavy metal stars.  As luck would have it, I didn’t have to wait long to find one; this Tommy Lee auto was the first autograph I pulled from Archives this year.  While an interesting curiosity, these lose a bit of their appeal when they take the place of autographs from baseball players.  Fan Favorites Autographs don’t bring in $30 though, so bring on the oddities.

8. 2013 Topps Heritage Matt Cain Mini 350 033/100
$33.00

Here’s a good example of prices that make no sense.  Ordinarily, a parallel card numbered to 100 wouldn’t be worth more than a couple of dollars for all but the hottest players.  The mini cards in 2013 Topps Heritage though were selling for $20 or more for no real reason.  I guess people just love hand-numbered mini parallels.

9. 2013 Topps Series 1 Josh Beckett Silk Collection 01/50
$31.00

$31 may seem high for a Silk Collection card, but having another low-numbered Josh Beckett card up for sale at the same time probably inflated the price a bit.

10. 2013 Topps Series 1 Stan Musial Chasing History Relic CHR-SM
$30.00

Stan Musial passed away shortly before 2013 Topps Series 1 was released.  While it may seem a bit morbid, this helped sales of Musial items.  At $30, this is the most I’ve gotten for a memorabilia card this year and is more than four times the selling price of any other memorabilia card I’ve pulled in the last two years except for last year’s Posey jumbo patch.

The Next 12

Occupying the $17.50-$30 range, there are plenty of familiar names from number 11 to number 22.  Puig, Machado, Trout, Harper, etc. all have a spot here.  Parallels, photo variations, and autographs dominate this slot and represent the best of the rest before we get to the manufactured material tier in the $5-$17.50 range.  For comparison, this price range is about the same as the range for the 12 cards shown at the end of last year’s list, but those were five slots higher.  Only seven of the top 22 cards counted as guaranteed hits in their products and most of those were rarer versions than would ordinarily be expected.  Five of the 22 came from some form of redemption pack and weren’t even in any purchased product.  That does it for 2013.  This has been an interesting experiment for the last two years, but I’m not seeing enough of a return to justify these games of chance so much in the future.

The Essentials: 2013 Mets SP Photo Variations

Posted by on 18 December 2013 Comments Off on The Essentials: 2013 Mets SP Photo Variations

And now for something completely different

A lot of baseball cards have been released in 2013. Between Topps (MLB and MLBPA licenses), Panini (MLBPA license), Leaf (no licenses), and Upper Deck (MLBPA license but strict MLB oversight), more than 40 baseball products have been released this year. So which cards stand out from the rest? To answer that question, we’ll break down the key Mets cards from 2013 in The Essentials.

One class of insert that has been on the rise lately is the short printed photo variation. Inserted at a rate of one per box or less, these cards are a cheap way for manufacturers to add value to their products just by printing ordinary cards. Photo subjects range from alternate photos of players to special event photos to squirrels. One thing they all have in common is that they rarely feature very many Mets.

Out of Bounds

2013’s first product brought us the first Mets photo variation of the year. The theme for the variations in 2013 Topps Series 1 was “out of bounds,” meaning photos of players making plays in foul territory or over the outfield wall. Card 400 shows a very dirty David Wright settling in under a pop fly as fans look on. Sharp readers may notice that Series 1 stops at card 331, indicating that these SPs are not limited to players featured in the base set (this trend would continue in the remainder of the base Topps releases). A similar variant was released in 2013 Topps Chrome.

All-Stars

Just like last year, Topps used photos from the All-Star game in most of the photo variations in 2013 Topps Update. And just like last year, one of the 25 base SPs features the two Mets representatives sharing a candid moment. Another SP shows David Wright chatting with some of his fellow NL All-Stars. But wait, there’s more.

David Wright sure got around at the 2013 All-Star game. He guest starred on Justin Verlander’s SP (apparently levitating a glove) and brought the entire NL home run derby team to Bryce Harper’s SP. His final appearance was on one of the 25 limited (one per two cases) SPs with Tom Seaver (not shown) crashing Matt Harvey’s US1 card number.

Gypsy Queen Minis

 

Not shown to scale

So apparently I bought a complete Mets team set of Gypsy Queen with all minis and SPs at some point this year.  And there are two photo variants in the minis, the one with David Wright not making a silly face and the one with Tom Seaver making a silly face.  Gypsy Queen really isn’t my thing, so that’s all I’ve got.

Bowman Chrome

Rafael Montero was featured twice in the Bowman Chrome Prospects set, first on card BCP50 in 2013 Bowman and then on card BCP204 in 2013 Bowman Chrome. Montero also had a photo variation in 2013 Bowman Chrome because for some reason they decided to use the same exact photo on both base cards (and Montero’s autograph card) and had a leftover photo from a spring training photo shoot. I guess they just really liked the photo from the other cards because it’s the same photo (with some uniform modification) from Montero’s 2012 Topps Heritage Minor League cards.

The Essentials: 2013 Mets Manufactured Material

Posted by on 13 December 2013 Comments Off on The Essentials: 2013 Mets Manufactured Material

The kitchen sink of baseball cards has standouts and oddities

A lot of baseball cards have been released in 2013. Between Topps (MLB and MLBPA licenses), Panini (MLBPA license), Leaf (no licenses), and Upper Deck (MLBPA license but strict MLB oversight), more than 40 baseball products have been released this year. So which cards stand out from the rest? To answer that question, we’ll break down the key Mets cards from 2013 in The Essentials.

Manufactured material, like game-used memorabilia and certified autographs, traces its roots in the modern sports card era back to the late 1990s. Aside from its use as a surface for autographs though, it wasn’t until recent years that manufactured material came into its own as a hobby offering with diversity and innovation. Topps raised the bar in 2012 with premium metal manufactured relics and continued this trend into 2013.

Minor League Logos

So many things wrong with that d’Arnaud card…

Back again after their debut in 2012, minor league hat logo patches from many minor league teams were included in Topps Pro Debut and Topps Heritage Minor League. Oddly, it looks like these are the exact same patches that were used in 2012. Topps must have had a few extras left over… Note the use of last year’s logos for the St. Lucie Mets and Buffalo Bisons (as for why Travis d’Arnaud is shown with the Bisons, well…). Between the two products, six Mets were featured on logo patch cards, covering most of the top prospects in the Mets farm system. Unlike last year, a consistent style was used for both sets of logo patch inserts in 2013. It would be nice to see Topps continue this moving forward to create a running set with top prospects for years to come. The logos need a bit of an update though.

Mascot Patches

Not shown: Buster T. Bison. Not sure I even want to…

New for 2013, Topps Pro Debut added patch cards for various minor league mascots. Cyclones mascot Sandy the Seagull was the only mascot from a current Mets farm team featured in this set, but Buffalo Bisons mascots Buster T. Bison and Belle the Ballpark Diva were shown in their 2012 incarnations, so I guess they count (though I wouldn’t exactly call them essential). I’m not quite sold on these just yet.

Retail Commemorative Patches

At the major league level, the bulk of the manufactured material was released in the base Topps products: Topps Series 1, Topps Series 2, and Topps Update. Many of those were the cracker jack-style prize inside $20 retail blasters, included as a consolation prize for spending $20 on a few packs of cards with terrible odds on getting anything good (with most of those “good” cards not worth much of anything anyway). Of course, with typical selling prices between $5 and $25, they sometimes make you feel like a bit of a chump for spending $100 a pop on hobby jumbo boxes where the only decent card is a manufactured relic that sells for between $5 and $25… But I digress.

The first of the retail manufactured patch sets feature miniature versions of commemorative shoulder patches or anything else Topps felt like making. Only two Mets were included here, David Wright with the Mets 50th anniversary patch and Tom Seaver with the 1969 World Series patch. I guess these can get filed away with all of the similar cards Topps has produced over the last few years.

The second retail manufactured patch set consists of framed mini card patches featuring an assortment of rookie cards and other random stuff. For the Mets, that meant rookie card patches from Darryl Strawberry, Dwight Gooden, and Jose Reyes and a very off-center 1970 Topps Nolan Ryan.

Silk Collection

Shoulder surgery starting pitchers for the, um, DL I guess…

Honestly, I’m not really sure how to classify silk cards. They’re not typically considered relics, but they are technically manufactured material, so here they are. R.A. Dickey, David Wright, and Matt Harvey are the big Mets names with silk cards in 2013, but I don’t have any of them so here’s Johan Santana and Shaun Marcum.

Award Winner Relics

This year’s theme for hobby manufactured relics was award winners. Each card featured a tiny metal replica of one of several featured awards, including MVPs, Cy Youngs, Silver Sluggers, Rookies of the Year, World Series MVPs, etc. The best looking of the bunch were the MVP relics, but the Mets have never had an MVP.

They have had a bunch of Cy Young winners though, most recently R.A. Dickey in 2012. Who was not featured in this set. Instead, we got Tom Seaver and Dwight Gooden.

Darryl Strawberry’s Silver Slugger rounds out the three Mets featured in Series 1 with a photo that somewhat ironically crops out the bat he is swinging. Series 2 featured Mets Rookies of the Year Tom Seaver, Darryl Strawberry, and Dwight Gooden. Um, what happened to Jon Matlack? Am I the only one who remembers that he existed?

Proven Mettle Coins

And that brings us to the last and best category of manufactured relics, the coins. Last year, Topps introduced manufactured coin relics, the first I’ve seen since some pretty lame attempts in the late ’90s that embedded what looked like amusement park tokens into cards. The Topps version uses huge coins with the card barely wrapped around them. Only one Met, Tom Seaver of course, was featured in last year’s coins. In 2013, the Proven Mettle (get it?) coins featured a three-tier parallel with copper (#d/99), wrought iron (#d/50), and steel (#d/10) versions. David Wright joins Seaver this time for a total of six Mets cards. If you only get one manufactured material card from 2013, it should be one of these coins.

Did I miss anything?  Let me know in the comments.