2022 Topps NPB Sucks, Don't Ever Buy It

 

There is no stronger motivation to return to blogging after a couple of months hiatus than the desire to complain about something.  Fortuitously the purchase of a box of 2022 Topps NPB has provided me with a very good opportunity to validate that hypothesis.

It was my son's birthday this week and having almost completed the Calbee set this year one bag of chips at a time together I thought I'd get him a box of cards we could rip and try to put the set together in one go.  I found boxes of both Topps and BBM on Yahoo Auctions and decided to give the Topps one a try.  I picked it up almost a month ago and set it aside until the big day.

My son had fun opening the packs.  That is almost the only nice thing that I can say about this set.  I could say the same about packs of 1991 Donruss or pretty much any other set for that matter so....yeah.

This set just sucks so bad I don't know where to start.  So I'll start with the box itself.  That is an ugly, unimaginatively designed box.  The packs inside, which I don't have a photo of handy, are even more boring to look at.  I remember what Topps boxes were like in the 80s - very colorful designs with pictures of cards of the stars on them.  They made you really want to buy the packs.  To further entice you they even made the boxes themselves out of cards, which was an ingenious idea.  

2022 Topps NPB basically looks like a carton of cigarettes sold in a country with very strict plain packaging laws.  I almost expected to see a giant warning about lung cancer with a scary picture of a damaged lung on the side.  This is just as god awful a package design as you can get.

But what about the cards themselves?  Well....

They almost exactly copied the 2022 MLB Topps design except that they didn't put the team logo where the team logo is supposed to go.  Kind of dull but not awful.  I give them points for having slightly better photography than Calbee, which is not a high standard.

The backs though just make my blood boil:

What the F is this?  Is this a joke?  This is a joke right?  Tell me this is a joke.  This can't not be a joke, so it must be a joke. 

My favorite part of the joke is where they could only fit two lines of stats (2021 and career) at the very bottom because they needed to devote the rest of the card back to....nothing!  Literally empty space with nothing but a tiny team logo taking up about 15% of it.  

This is so gratuitously awful I almost have to ask if mischievous vandals might have broken into the Topps offices and replaced whatever the real design for the card backs was with this....this....this.....this..... (voice from the guy sitting next to me as I type this: "Tomfoolery"?) TOMFOOLERY, yes, thank you.

Oh and you know what the insert cards are?  These same garbage cards but with different colored borders!  And a retro throwback subset using the 1958 Topps design, perhaps chosen because that is the dullest one that could be copied with the least amount of effort possible.  No autographed cards or anything like that of course.

This set just sucks so bad I actually feel kind of guilty about having insulted my first born child by having made a gift of these to him.  I hope one day when he is old enough to appreciate how bad these cards are that he will forgive me.  

Anyway, I guess I got what I paid for.  This set was released last month with a suggested retail price of 13,200 Yen per box.  I paid 8,000 for this one on Yahoo Auctions, and there are plenty available to be had at around that price.  Word seems to be getting around about how much these suck.  Good.  I hope this post will contribute to that.  Be forewarned: 2022 Topps NPB is the worst set of baseball cards I've seen in......I don't know how long but a while.

For Christmas, I'll be getting my son a box of 2022 BBM.  

The Other Time Topps Made a Japanese Set

 

I had about a 6 month stretch in the latter half of 2021 where I stepped back from the hobby since work was so busy (I mentioned the reason for this in a post last summer, if anyone is interested everything worked out well for me in the career department in the end).

When I came back a few weeks ago, I had a hell of a time trying to catch up on what was going on.  Topps was releasing a Japanese set?  Oh, then Topps lost the MLB license and might not produce baseball cards anymore?  Then Topps got bought by some company called Fanatics which had scuppered Topps' licensing deal and now they are going to use Topps to keep making cards?  

That certainly escalated, and then sort of de-escalated, quickly.

Anyway, about Topps' NPB set I've taken a look at the reviews, particularly Dave's, and have decided to give it a pass.  "Meh, boring" seems to be the critical consensus that has formed about the set, and I have to say that I agree.  I say this while hoping that Topps will continue making NPB cards (much as I hope they continue to make MLB cards) but its just.....not THESE kind of cards.  Its a bit awkward to ask, especially with all the shenanigans you've been dealing with recently but please, Topps, make better NPB cards.

Anyway, while I haven't picked up any of the new Topps Japanese cards, I did coincidentally recently pick up some old Topps Japanese cards.  In 2003 Topps teamed up with Japanese company Kanebo (which had previously issued NPB sets in 1993 and 1994) to produce and sell a Topps set in Japan.  

The 2003 Topps/Kanebo set featured MLB players rather than NPB ones, though it has a lot of Japanese MLB players featured in it.  I found a near complete set of the first series on Yahoo Auctions (53 out of 55 cards) and decided to snag it. 

The set uses the design of the 2002 American Topps set on the front, but with Japanese text on the card backs.  They issued a larger second set of 110 cards that was based on the 2003 Topps design and looks completely different.

The near-set I bought also included a wrapper that the cards came in (above).  This brought back some nice memories for me.  My wife and I got married in 2003 when this set came out and I remember one day that summer popping into a Family Mart convenience store near our apartment (we were living in Himeji at the time, very close to its famous castle) and I saw packs of these on the shelf.  I had one of those "What are you doing in Japan?" moments which I get when I unexpectedly come across something familiar from back home (like a pack of Topps baseball cards) in a setting where I wouldn't normally expect to find it.  I always like those moments, so the memory stuck with me. 

I bought one pack, took it home and I remember getting an Albert Pujols out of it which I thought was pretty cool. There were only 3 cards in the pack though, which seemed kind of stingy to me so I didn't buy anymore and I think they disappeared from stores within a few weeks so even if I had wanted to get more I couldn't have.  

At some point in the past 19 years, those three cards I pulled got lost in all my stuff (I probably still have them in a box somewhere but who knows) and I had forgotten completely about them.  Then when I saw this big pile of them up for auction it rekindled memories of a much younger, handsomer, less bothered by nagging back and knee-pain, newlywed version of myself stumbling across the existence of this set. I just knew that I had to complete the mission that guy had started all those years ago.  So I bought it.

I think it was a great buy actually, these cards are quite hard to come by in lots like that.  There are usually a few random singles up for sale on Yahoo Auctions but no more than that.  I don't think these were big sellers back in 2003, perhaps everyone had that same "what, only 3 cards?" reaction I had and stopped buying them after the first pack.  So today they are hard to come by (which is also the case with the second set).  Now I'm just two cards short of finishing the sucker though!  I'll try to track those last two down by the end of this year (the only collecting goal I've set for myself so far this year).  

Stuff I Hate Part 1: Memorabelia cards

I thought I would start this post with a proposition: memorabelia cards are horrible, horrible things.

The rest of this post will be me elucidating why I make this proposition.


I should start by acknowledging that some memorabelia cards are OK in my book.  If they want to cut up a Derek Jeter bat to put in a card then I don`t really have a problem with that.  Since an active player could in theory bring a new bat into a game at every plate appearance he makes, you basically have a nearly inexhaustible supply of game-used bats for that player to "make" provided he plays a full season.  Giving him a bat to use in one at-bat and then cutting it up to put in cards doesn`t really strike me as being wrong.

The inevitably horrible logic of the hobby collective however almost always demands that reasonable ideas be dogmatically taken to extremes which produce disastrous results, and memorabelia cards are no exception.  I take the monstrosity that appears at the top of this post: a Babe Ruth bat card.

A bat used by Babe Ruth in an actual game is a historically important, aesthetically pleasing thing.  I`m sure there are a fair number of them out there since he had a long career, but there is this little thing called "historical preservation" which suggests that historically important things with value should be protected.  In other words, a given generation shouldn't view itself as the owner of a historical legacy - with the absolute right to acquire, possess, dispose of or even destroy whatever they have legal title to - but rather as the current holder of that legacy with a duty owed to future generations to hand it down in more or less as good a condition as it was when we received it.

Turning said historical legacy into little woodchips to hand down to those future generations I would argue constitutes a flagrant breach of that duty, even if we do go to the trouble of enclosing them in colorful little cards that cost 2 cents to produce.

I am, perhaps, stating the obvious, but lets think about the economic logic at work here and the question of what this generation of baseball hobbyists are leaving to future generations.  The only reason these bats and other things are being sliced up is so they will fit into a pack of cards and drive sales of those packs.  Their economic value as a driver of pack sales was calculated as being worth more to Topps (Upper Deck, etc) than its value as a bat, hence it was cut up.

The problem with that is once all those packs are sold, that added economic value evaporates and we are left with a bunch of woodchips in ugly cards that nobody can "chase" anymore.

I`m pretty sure that these cards will mostly be worthless, or only worth a nominal amount, in a few years.  Right now the Babe Ruth bat card at the top of this post has a BIN price of $150 on Ebay.  It is not going to be worth that much 10 years from now (if its even worth that much now).

I have a few reasons for stating as much, but the main one has to do wtih the short term thinking involved.  Cards with memorabelia in them were a big novelty when they first came out in much the same way that say 1991 Donruss Elite were a big novelty when they came out. The value of stuff like this at a given point in time is entirely dependent on the logic which drives the market at that point in history.  When something is novel and people are chasing it in packs because they are perceived to be valued and/or hard to get items, the value will be high.  Once that novelty wears off and people are no longer chasing the packs, the longer term value will depend on the inherent ability of the item to attract sufficient interest from future collectors.  1991 Donruss Elite were massively valuable in 1991, but today are pretty cheap for that reason' they just aren't as appealing to collectors in 2014 as they were to collectors in 1991.

The novelty of memorabelia cards has probably started to wear off by now and I think fundamentally these are just massively unattractive things when compared to, say, an actual bat or jersey.  Our generation of collectors inherited a certain number of bats that were once held by the likes of Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb and Ted Williams.  We are handing down to future generations woodchips placed in cards that, 20 years from now, will look hopelessly tacky and undesirable.  It doesn`t speak well to the character of the collective hobby that we have allowed this to happen.

You can add to that the fact that all we have to go on is the word of a card company which may no longer exist a few years from now that they actually had a real Babe Ruth bat that they cut up to put in those cards.  I'm sure Topps did in some verifiable way purchase a bat that was purported to be a real Babe Ruth bat, but the fact is all we have is a bunch of wood chips to go on if we ever want to independently verify the authenticity of it.  Forged bats and other memorabelia exist throughout the hobby and without the bat to actually examine, we can never know if it was real or not.  Verifying the authenticity of wood chips is pretty much impossible (not to mention pointless, all we have is a worthless bunch of woodchips after all).

And don't get me started on what Upper Deck did to that civil war flag.  The only other wanton, deliberate destuction of a valued historical artifact which I can compare that to is the Taliban's destruction of the Buddhas of Bamiyan back in 2001.  No kidding - the card industry is so out of whack on this that I am actually drawing a reasoned (if somewhat inflammatory) parrallel between their behaviour and that of one of the most evil, backwards organizations in modern history.