1984 Topps proves I am stupid and here is why

 

I got back into The Hobby(tm) at the beginning of this year. Well, I guess at Christmas. I've been collecting cards and other nonsense off and on since I was a kid, owning my first hockey cards around 1989 or so. Like with my other hobbies, I've always dipped in and out, but even when I dip out I know cards are something I will return to at some point later. It could be in a few months or a few years, but I find my way back. I don't worry about it too much. Just a little.

Being a lifelong card collector guy, at this point I know what works for me and what doesn't. I know what gets me the most value, costs the least amount of dollars for the most amount of joy. It's really the same advice you see all the time. Set a budget. Have a focus. Be patient. Enjoy the process. Collect what you like. I mean, you can apply this advice to a large swath of your life and it would be apt.

 I used to really enjoy set building. There is fun in slowly completing a list of cards, adding them to a box or binder a bit at a time. One of other reasons I enjoy set building is that I don't necessarily care about having expensive cards, or stuff like that. I do like that stuff, but not because they are expensive. I also enjoy worthless cards, if there happens to be something about the card I like. Like the photography, the player, the design, just something. Building sets ends up being an excuse to collect a bunch of worthless cards and keeping them to a theme, which is the theme of the set.

The problem with set building is that you end up with a ton of cards. Like, a ton. They are difficult to store, to transport, and to sell if you decide you don't want them for whatever reason. It ends up being simpler to just select some cards you enjoy from each set and collect those. They don't have to be key cards or whatever. They can be anything you like. But there isn't much point in getting hundreds of cards when there's really only a handful of cards from a particular set that you really want.

The other thing with set collecting is that it is always cheaper to just buy the entire set. It costs a lot of money to collate a set a few cards at a time. The problem is that it is absolutely no fun whatsoever to buy a complete set that someone else built. Like, you get the set and think you will sit down and flip through it and enjoy it. But I find I never really enjoy it because it doesn't feel like "mine". I didn't create it. What I create belongs to me, and I have cheaply purchased someone else's joy at set building. You can't buy joy that way. It just doesn't work like that.

With that in mind, I decided to sell my 84 Topps set. It's the only complete set I owned by now. I had bought it complete in pages off Ebay a couple years ago or so. Owning it felt deflating. I had bought it because it's my birth year and I thought it would be fun to own the set from back then, and flip through it see what baseball looked like when I was a bouncing baby boy.

Yet, it wasn't fun. It just felt like I paid someone else to do the work of building the set for me. The pages sat in a binder for ages and I never looked at them. It's more fun to flip through these things with someone else who is interested in baseball from that year. To sit and flip through a binder of old Topps cards by myself makes me feel like I should be doing something else with my time. There is a difference between "collecting" and "collected". The hobby is about collecting, not about having collected.

I'm getting my collection down to a handful of cards on a few different themes, and then just focusing on those themes and that's it. So, like certain players, teams, stuff like that, with a focus on individual cards rather than completion. I like the idea of having a specific reason for each card I own and understanding why it fits into my broader collection. If I can't explain that, I can't own the card.

I listed the 84 Topps set on Ebay. It sold for $45, which is pretty cheap. It's in midgrade condition, but someone got a bargain. Honestly, I don't really care. I'm just glad someone else gets to enjoy it, since I wasn't.

Yet, there were a few problems. I listed it with free shipping, because if I had asked for shipping, I knew it would be ungodly expensive since I am shipping from Canada and the buyer is most likely to be American. In fact, the buyer did turn out to be American. What I didn't realize was that how expensive shipping would be. With the cost of shipping, Ebay fees, and the foreign exchange from US to Canadian dollars, my profit was $5 Canadian dollars.

Yes, $5 Canadian. That's like a wooden nickel in American money.

I should have just kept the stupid set, but I really didn't want it. I don't know where else to sell a complete 84 Topps set except Ebay. I know zero Canadians who want this. Maybe if I worked harder and posted the set on a bunch of Facebook groups for Canadian collectors, or took it to a card show I could have sold it. But that's a lot of work to sell something for just a few more bucks. I value money, but I value my time more.

What I should have done is not buy it in the first place. That's the lesson that sports cards teaches us, over and over again. That a fool and his money are soon parted. Often I buy stupid hobby stuff, be it cards, games, or comics, with the idea that if I decide down the line I don't really care for this item anymore, I can flip it and get my money back. It rarely works out that way.

 These days, it's even harder in Canada because of the difficulty buying and selling with the US. And the Canadian market is quite small, so if I decided to just sell stuff to other Canadians, I honestly wouldn't do much better because outside of hockey there just isn't much interest. If I did find a Canadian buy who was willing to pay more, like I mentioned it would take me so much more time and effort that I don't want to be bothered.

I am a rich man, but unfortunately I am rich in life experience and not in money. I would rather it be reversed. What my life experience in the hobby has taught me is to be considerate and intentional with your purchases in the first place. The cards I enjoy owning the most are individual, unique cards that I may have even paid a pretty penny for, but I don't care because the joy of owning the card is greater than its cost. Owning fewer things in life with each thing you own being more intentional is a good way to live, be it in the hobby or any other aspect of your life.

So, my motto going forward is to keep it simple, stupid. Emphasis on stupid. 

Is Fanatics releasing a product called Heritage meant to be ironic?

 Topps has just released this year's Heritage. It's copying the 77 Topps design. Heritage is mostly a set builders product. It's not the type of product people buy in order to get "hits". A lot of the parallels and inserts really suck, and tend not to be on theme with Heritage's vintage style. That means these days Heritage is pretty niche, because there hardly seems to be any collectors left in a hobby filled with people looking to gamble.

A lot of breakers and these sorts describe Heritage as boring and repetitive. Well, yes. If you aren't building the base set, then I just don't get the point of buying it. To tell you the truth, the only base cards that seem worth having are Heritage and flagship. It's not that flagship is any good, but just that it is the main Topps line and there's still some attraction to completing that set since it's been going for many decades now.

 Fanatics is completely antithetical to Heritage's concept. This is a company that is the complete opposite of honouring sports heritage. They are about churning out low quality crap in high numbers and making a fast buck. The company is a bunch of douchebag financebros who make crappy jerseys and crappy sports cards in a world completely run by hedge funds that have created a society that is just one massive wealth transfer from poor to rich.

I find most of what Topps is doing to be boring as fuck. Why do they even bother with base cards in most of their sets? Like if they just stopped doing base in Chrome, would anyone care? Upper Deck is the same way. I have a bunch of base cards I got from Allure hockey. I'm definitely not building that set. No one is. What's the point of these cards?

To me, base cards are about building a set that is a comprehensive review of the players from that season. So, if you want to look back at 1977 baseball, you can flip through a binder of 77 Topps and see all their smiling baseball player faces looking back at you. You can review their stats, see who was on what team, see the league leaders, record breakers, highlights, all that stuff. It's a commemorative photo album of a snapshot in time that can be collected, assembled, and enjoyed for as long as you like.

That is what is meant to work with Heritage. It's a large base set that is comprehensive. Because it is using designs from the past, which are almost invariably better than modern base card designs, it has great aesthetics. You can collect and collate Heritage and look back at it and say, "Look at baseball in 2026. Remember baseball? It's been locked out for three years now."

But I don't think Fanatics understands or appreciates their card market. It's just a cash grab, bleeding gamblers with terrible odds on addictive products. Opening new wax is toxic. Heritage is meant to be a set that bypasses all that, but with an uneven design, awful collation, terrible quality control, and lord knows whatever other problems, it seems not worth collecting. If that's the case, what's left for set builders? To get lost, because Fanatics only markets to gamblers. And also to children, so they can become addicted to gambling young. It's our era's new cigarette.

Anyway, this is a 77 Topps Nolan Ryan I grabbed on Ebay. I thought about building both the 77 Topps and this year's Heritage at the same time as a fun project. Seems like a cool idea, right? Well, I'm not sure if I am going to bother. I doubt I will bother with set building anymore at all, for the most part. Even vintage it's so much easier to just buy key cards and specific things I want and leave the commons for someone else.

Sports as analogies for life, or what I thought about on the car ride over to a card show

Baseball is the most democratic of sports. Everyone has responsibility for their position. Everyone gets a turn at bat. The best hitters don't get to take turns away from teammates. Everyone gets a chance to contribute. Baseball is the world as it should be.

Basketball is poetry in motion. It's art, maybe more art than sport. It tests the physical limits of the human body. Not only that, but it is majestic the way the body can contort to do a slam dunk after running suicides back and forth across the court for forty minutes. Seriously, trying running back and forth across a basketball court and see how many times you can do it. Basketball is the world as it could be.

Hockey is brutality. It's all about momentum and violence. Your luck can change in a split second. Like life, hockey is deeply unfair. The best teams frequently don't win. You may be the best in the world at what you do, but the game just doesn't give a shit. It's usually better to be lucky that good. Hockey is the world as it is.

I collect those three sports because they complete the holy trinity of how I view life. With that in mind, I stopped by the Leaside Card Show somewhere in midtown Toronto on Sunday afternoon. It's a show that has been going on for a few years a couple of times a month. The last time I went was probably pre-Covid, as I haven't been to any card shows in years. I live in downtown Toronto, and you would think the big city would have all kinds of card shows or whatever, but it's not the case. Most of the shows take place in some suburb that's a pain in the ass to get to.

It was a pain in the ass getting to this one, too. Toronto had shutdown the busiest parts of Yonge and Bloor for the St. Patrick's Day Parade, and it was a total nightmare trying to escape downtown. All the traffic was getting bottlenecked on Spadina. Getting home was easy though, since the parade was over. But Wal-Mart was supposed to deliver my groceries, but they couldn't get through the parade and returned to the store. They still haven't sent my groceries. And they have my money. Grrrrrrrr.

The card show wasn't busy. The weather also sucked, and people might have had other plans for St. Paddy's. Like sleeping in on Sunday after drinking green beer on Saturday. Which is fine by me, because it made browsing the tables so much easier.

The core of these smaller card shows in Canada are old guys selling old hockey cards. Often you see the same dinged up old hockey cards being sold by the same dinged up old men. I'm a dinged up middle-aged man, with four soft corners. Pretty much everyone was friendly, though, and I shot the shit with quite a few different people.

I love old hockey cards, but I just wish these smaller Canadian shows had more variety. I guess that's what sells around here. There were lots of old O-Pee-Chee baseball cards, but few modern baseball cards. Some basketball and football, but not much. More old hockey magazines and buttons and stuff like that, compared to other sports cards. I did meet an American dealer who had nothing but baseball, which gave us a chance to talk ball. If I'm a Canadian that can talk baseball, I think that makes me bilingual. 

Here is what I picked up.

 These three cards I got off a dealer who I know a little for $10 apiece (these are Canadian dollars, in case the prices seem weird). I thought that was good deal, especially since the one-touch cases came with the cards. I'm slowly working on Hall of Famer hoopers from sets before 1990. I just really liked how the LeBron splash card looked. I enjoy shiny cards when the aesthetics are gorgeous, especially when they have bright colours. I'm not a big fan of shiny stuff that is colourless and drab.

 A couple of Blue Jays cards for $5. I have a few dozen Joe Carter cards. He's my favourite ballplayer. The Alomar is an acetate numbered to 75. The Flair is just a base common, but I really like the design of Flair cards. Fleer did such a good job with brands like Flair and Ultra back in the 90s. I also like acetate cards and they are another example of shiny cards I enjoy.

These three 1970 Topps were $10. The Torre and the Flood were actually $10, and the Danny Walton was free. Curt Flood is one of the most important athletes in pro sports history. He's really an important figure in American labour history, too. I find his life to be really fascinating and I'm happy to own my first Flood card.

 These are the cartoons on the back. Someone really needs to publish a coffee table book of baseball cardback cartoons. I'm surprised these little cartoons don't get more attention from vintage card collectors. Instead of reprinting baseball cards, Topps could reprint cards of baseball cardback cartoons only.

What kind of art do you think Curt Flood made?

 This is a 68-69 O-Pee-Chee Dave Keon. $15. It's badly off center, but this set is like 79 Topps baseball where there are a ton of miscut cards. Centering is a massive problem for that year, but I'm fine with it. Keon is one of the best Leafs ever, and besides the centering the card is otherwise lovely.

That's it. I thought I had a nice little multi sport haul. If I wasn't so ADHD or whatever I could probably pick one sport and focus my collection, but I have an appreciation for what each of these sports represents about life. So my money gets spread thin, and I learn to live with it.

I participated in sports card Twitter and I feel all the worse for it

 Holy crap is the sports card discussion on Twitter toxic.

I don't use Twitter much. I actually never used it when it was allegedly popular. I knew zero people who used it here in Canada. It always seemed like a platform for celebrities and politicians to publicize themselves without using mainstream media, and for journalists and content creators to attract attention by getting a following and then redirecting that following offsite. If you didn't fall into one of those categories, it seemed pointless.

I joined a couple of years ago. I was actually on Bluesky way before, back when Bluesky was invite only and mostly black and queer voices. But I like to talk about old pro wrestling, and the Bluesky community for that niche is terrible. There is a strong community of older wrestling fans on Twitter that are fun to engage with, but I really just wish they would all move over to Bluesky. I barely used that Twitter account. I also had a Threads account the day it launched, but that platform felt like a living television commercial and I never enjoyed it. I have a burner account on TikTok, but I hoenstly don't get the appeal and feel that I am too old to understand. I don't use Facebook, although I was first on it back when it was university only in 2004. Yes, I'm old and growing older with each word I type.

I've been trying different social media platforms for sports cards. Bluesky has been my favourite, with the best engagement and the most like minded people. I'm using Instagram, but I find it boring. Instagram, however, is useful because a lot of local businesses post updates on their Instagram accounts, so that is at least one reason to use it. But I find there is little actual social interaction on Instagram and it feels more like looking at classified ads.

I decided to create a sports card account on Twitter. I figured it would suck, but I guess I'm a masochist. You're probably thinking I'm more of a moron than a masochist, and perhaps you are right. What I really wanted was to be able to stay updated with what's going on in the sports card world from a news perspective. Bluesky is great for discussing old cards and stuff, but it rarely feels like a breaking news sort of app.

Well, after being on Twitter a few days I no longer want to stay updated on sports cards. Nearly every user I have interacted with on there is someone who I would not want to meet in real life. It was a mix of people complaining about Fanatics anti-consumer practices (obvious solution is to stop buying their shit), men breathlessly masturbating over the high prices paid by other wealthier men for nonsense collectibles, and toxic, angry arguments about things like digital assets, scammers, social media influencers, and basically everything else.

I felt like I was in a room full of the grossest, dumbest people who all hate one another and have been driven to insanity by the collective stench they have created. 

Why are people so desperate for attention these days? It's weird. I see so many accounts posting "hot takes" with the obvious purpose of trying to get others to argue with them to boost their algorithm ranking. Why? I see female card collectors talking about how they like to walk around naked in their homes when they get back from work. Who cares? And all of these people are so greedy, to the point where I think none of them actually watch the sports they collect and are only interested in "breaking" and "flipping".

The best collectors are the ones who care little about cost and a lot about value. People who don't care if something is junk wax or in poor condition if it is something they enjoy. People who can actually discuss the details of the sports and teams they follow in a joyful and positive manner that is easily reflected in their collecting habits.

Twitter has none of that. You can feel the greasy, desperate greed of its users. These are people who badly want to be someone they are not and never will be, but think somehow they can get there by selling baseball cards. They would be better off spending a fraction of that money they are losing on therapy, and the rest of us would be better off for it.

Yes, I had expected it to suck, but I had figured it would be easy to steer clear of the nonsense and that I would find some accounts to follow that would simply provide news and updates about what is going on in the sports card bubble. But even those accounts spent huge amounts of time arguing with other users and complaining endlessly about every little thing that I realized Twitter has nothing to offer besides the feeling of being dunked into a septic tank head first.

I deleted my Twitter account shortly after joining, and then had a shower. 

Honestly, my preference is to have no social media. I've tried that in past, and it works okay. The problem is that so often you need to have at least an account somewhere to keep up with what's going on, even if it's a burner account that you never post on. It's the nature of the world we live in now.

I feel like a complete idiot for joining Twitter in 2026. At least I'm open minded enough to try new things, but smart enough to duck out when a bad idea is obvious. I value my time and mental health too much, even if sometimes I'm dumb enough to take a risk. 

A handful of free 1965 Topps

 I received these three 1966 Topps cards after participating in a giveaway thread on Bluesky. It was a thread where you post some cards you will send for free, and in return you can claim some cards.

It was very expensive to mail cards from here to the US, so it's not something I'm going to participate in again. However, people on Bluesky south of the border were kind enough to match my expensive shipping and send some stuff up my way.

I got these three cards from one user. They are the oldest cards in my collection now, and I've never owned anything from 66 Topps before. In the past, I have owned 50s cards from Bowman and 50s hockey cards from Parkhurst in low grade, but that was long ago. I can't recall if I've owned anything from the 60s.

I enjoy these cards so much more than most modern stuff. I do have an appreciation for modern cards, so I don't want to be completely pessimistic. But there is something so charming about getting a glimpse into the past, glancing at the way ballplayers used to look.

 I'm unfamiliar with these three players, but that's cool. When I was a kind I learned so much about baseball and hockey by reading cards, and it's still fun to do that as an adult. Not everything should be about looking stuff up online.

I am in the process of refocusing my collection and shedding a lot of cards I don't want, so I can purchase vintage baseball, hockey, and basketball. I never really feel buyer's remorse picking up vintage. It sometimes happens with modern. It happens all the time opening boxes.

I got these cards for free (kinda, I guess I got them because I paid to ship cards to someone else), and I like them more than stuff I've pulled out of packs and blaster boxes that cost way too much money. I'm quite sure most other card bloggers feel this way, so this isn't an abnormal experience. 

I value aesthetics over price, but I'm goofy that way

 Last night I ended up going to a trade night at the card shop closest to my apartment. It's 401 Games in downtown Toronto. They mostly sell board games and Pokemon cards and other stuff I know nothing about, but they had a sports card counter at the back. Once a month they do a trade night where they do raffles and that sort of thing.

I had never been before and wasn't sure what to expect. I figured it would be at least a chance to just chat with some people locally about cards, if not anything else.

Upper Deck Series 2 hockey came out this week. I've opened a lot of packs and blaster boxes in the past few weeks since starting this blog, but honestly I'm kinda tired of new product already. I started collecting cards in 1990 back when I was a kid, and it's literally the same old hype cycle with every single new product. And there are a lot of new products these days, so the hype is endless.

The other problem with all this hype is there is no institutional memory of previous hype cycles. For those of us who have been collecting this nonsense for awhile, we all remember times when big rookie cards would debut and a few years later those cards would be worthless when the rookie doesn't pan out. But every new star rookie card in every new sport is hyped like the second coming of Babe Ruth.

Opening packs is fun. It has the same kind of vibe as opening Christmas presents or playing scratch-and-win tickets. But's expensive. At this trade night, to enter their raffle you had to buy a pack of Series 2. They were $18 a pack. Holy! Well, I bought one, because I think if you are going to one of these card store events, you should spend some money because the store is putting on this event to drum up business. It doesn't seem fair to the shop owner to show up and not purchase anything.

Anyway, I ended up pulling this card, which has made its rounds on social media.

It's goofy as hell, but I'm goofy as hell, so it all works out. Of course, I think the photographer was clearly inspired by the poster for this movie:

 These are the kind of unique cards I like to add to my collection. I enjoy having conversation pieces. That's one of the big aspects of collecting that attracts me. I like to have the type of collection where I can show my cards to someone who doesn't collect, and even they enjoy the cards because there is something unique about all of them. It could be the design, the photography, the player, or the card being iconic. 

I think aesthetics matter a lot when it comes to collecting. I have a hard time justifying owning ugly cards even if they are valuable. I don't necessarily want a valuable collection if the cards are unattractive. Aesthetics are important to me, to the point where I want every piece of my collection to fit into an aesthetic theme.

To me, aesthetic value matters more than monetary value. If I have a card that is valuable but ugly, really my hope for that card is for it to increase in price, so I can sell it for more than I paid. After I can buy something I really want.

For vintage, of course condition matters. But there are some card sets I just find gorgeous, even if they don't have anything valuable. I like 89-90 Fleer basketball, for example. It's more or less junk wax, but the design has such vibrant coloured borders. Contrast that with 87-88 Fleer basketball, which is worth significantly more, but is butt ugly. 

I'm big on coloured borders, unique photography, high quality card stock. I also like full bleed photos, but only if the photography is incredible. For modern cards, I prefer parallel cards that have a colour scheme that match's the team colours. So, like blue parallels for the Blue Jays. The value doesn't matter so much. I like the idea of having all the cards next to one another to create an aesthetic theme.

How much do aesthetics matter to you? 

The dilemma of what to do with inserts that are "hits"

 I picked up a hanger box of 2026 Topps Series 1 from EB Games because I'm just so happy to have somewhere to buy new baseball cards that's within walking distance of my apartment. I had opened two fat packs the other day and pulled a huge card, so like with the blaster of Upper Deck Allure yesterday I thought I would test my luck again.

I didn't pull anything I really wanted this time, though. Here's what I got:

The box was all base cards and low level inserts and parallels. I think the parallels look nice. I'm not as negative as other collectors on parallels, as long as the parallel design is different enough from the base card that it feels like a different card. Like, those parallels from Stadium Club where the font is a different colour are pretty stupid. I am more negative on parallels of insert cards, though, as it feels like a hat on a hat.

I'm not sure if I am going to build the base set or not. I've not tried to build a current baseball base set in close to twenty years. I'm not super keen on dropping a bunch of money to do this one, but it gives me an excuse to keep buying new product because then I am actually doing something with the base cards. 

I also didn't watch much baseball last year until the playoffs, so my feeling is that this will help familiarize myself with the players outside of the Blue Jays. I mean, I learned players and stats and stuff as a kid from the backs of baseball and hockey cards. I used to sit on the living room floor and play games with my cards, and that's how I learned about this stuff. I'm getting a bit of childhood nostalgia opening packs of baseball cards again.

I don't really know what to do with these inserts, though. I don't really want any of them. Shipping costs in Canada makes it impossible to sell, because I have to charge something like ten times the value of the card in shipping. Trading is hard because I would need to trade them to other Canadians to make it worthwhile, and most other Canadian baseball fans are Jays fans like me and wouldn't want any of these cards.

I'll probably end up sending them off to COMC once I have enough of them. I've done that in the past, but the problem there is that it's expensive to list them and often they just sit in the account for ages.

To be honest, if I am building the base set, I would rather just get more base cards than some crappy inserts that no one wants. Or instead of a pile of crappy inserts, maybe just one good insert that sells for more than a buck, so it's worth it to sell or use as trade bait. These aren't really the "hits" that Topps makes them out to be, as they are more of a pain in the ass to deal with than anything else.

People always say give them out to kids, but there are a ton of problems with that. First, I know zero kids and zero people with kids. Second, most charities here don't want products. They don't even accept toys or gift cards. Just cash. Third, kids in Canada give less than a shit about baseball. And honestly? If you're going to donate to a cause, donate something worthwhile and don't pawn off your junk onto others who are less fortunate. I know I'm in the minority on this one, but it's how I feel.

 If anyone has some Jays cards they want to be rid of, I would be happy to trade all of these in your favour. Even junk wax would be appreciated.