With baseball cards, as in life, I don't think it's a terrible thing to live in the past.
The key is moderation. And while I'm admittedly a perennial fan of old-time sets like Heritage and Archives, I've long wondered if Topps relies a little too heavily on its history. Throw sets like A&G and Gypsy Queen into the fold - and not to mention all the retro-style inserts spread out amongst Flagship and such - and you've sure got a lot of nods to the past.
The question then becomes: does living in the past invade the present, the ability to create new and joyful things? I'm starting to think Topps is tipping that scale - we haven't seen a ton of "innovation" in the last handful of years, often thrown aside in favor of designs we've seen over and over again. (I need another '87 Topps tribute like I need a hole in the head.)
A good example of this is something I've seen a few people investigate lately - tracking how many different Topps designs their favorite players have been featured on.
This topic intrigues me for a variety of reasons, not the least of which being that it gave me an excuse to go through all my Ichiro cards and see the variety of designs he's been featured on over the years.
While I actually own many more cards of my man Vladimir Guerrero, I chose Ichiro for this post because his career so closely aligns with Topps's deep plunge into its history (he's been around for almost all of Heritage, Archives, etc.). Whether or not you consider 1951 or '52 to be the true First Year of Topps (I tend to lean towards the latter), Ichiro's covered everything from 1951-60.
That's mostly thanks to Heritage, but you've got a few random inserts and some Archives to help the cause as well.
One of the special wrenches Ichiro provides is that I'm 99 percent sure he didn't have a contract with Topps in 2013 & 2014, so he wasn't featured on the '64 or '65 designs in Heritage those years.
Thankfully, '65 is saved with a "Topps Choice" insert from last year - and even with the glaring '64 Topps gap, Ichiro's been featured on 19 of the first 20 Topps designs, which is pretty impressive when you stop and think about it.
Things get a bit more spotty after that.
I still don't know how UD Vintage got away with blatantly stealing vintage Topps looks, but even so they provided my only glimpse of Ichiro on the '71(ish) design.
I'm a bit surprised that Ichiro's never been featured on the '72 design (or at least I've never seen one), but Throwback Thursday and Archives help save a couple other mid-'70s Topps stalwarts.
A question I never considered before I started this - do subsets and mashups count?
That Archives SP features Ichiro on the '77 Topps "Turn Back the Clock" subset, and the other (Pilots throwback!) is a combination of 1977-79 Topps from last year's interesting Super '70s Sports checklist - for what it's worth, I'm counting the former, but not the latter.
The early '80s are fairly well-represented in my Ichiro pages, mostly thanks to the gaggle of Flagship inserts we've seen recently.
Check off '86 & '87, too.
Another stretch, but I'll count this Throwback Thursday "Record Breakers" card as an '88 Topps tribute.
'90s Ichiro tributes are almost nonexistent because, for better or worse, there just haven't been a lot of nods to the '90s in our hobby...yet.
Somehow, though, Ichiro has been featured on the '91 design in two different Archives checklists without having appeared on any other '90s sets out of the cards I own.
From there, we go to the "playing days" era of Ichiro's career (starting with his 2001 Topps rookie), and let's just take a moment to admire how many great cards this dude got.
As I mentioned earlier, Ichiro probably didn't have a contract with Topps in 2013 & 2014, so those are glaring gaps in his canon (at least until they get around to making that "Cards That Never Were" set I've been begging for).
And while he didn't get a Flagship base card in 2019 or 2020, those two years are saved by a couple photo variations I've had the good fortune to track down.
When you add it up, Ichiro's been featured on 49 out of Topps's 71 total designs - darn near 70 percent of all the Topps sets ever made, which is way more than I'd thought.
I suppose if I wanted to get really crazy we could go back to the tobacco days of sets like A&G and Topps 205 and see how many of those designs Ichiro has graced through the years, but I only have so much time these days, you know? For now, we can't deny that some of his best cards came on old Topps designs - something that can probably be said for a lot of other fan favorites out there.
Like I said, maybe living in the past isn't so bad.
Interesting post... I'd do something like that if I had been devoted enough to filling out my player collections :-)
ReplyDeleteThat 2012 Heritage card annoys me that they put "ICHIRO" in the small first name type. At least they learned their lesson by 2017 Heritage
Wow,that is a great idea! As someone who doesn't dress much differently than when I was 12, living in the past is fine with me, haha!
ReplyDeleteI've got maybe 8 or so of these.
ReplyDeleteIf there's a year where Topps is absolutely sure that it will be their last year of baseball for the length of the Fanatics contract (i.e. they're not going to be bought by Fanatics or something), I can see Topps doing a super-Heritage or super-Archives where they put a lot of players on every Topps flagship design ever. Wouldn't be the worst idea, really.
Nice Ichiro run. Maybe if Topps had paid more attention to the future they wouldn't have let Fanatics sneak in. Although an insider told me last weekend that both MLB & the Players offered Topps the deal that Fanatics made. They said no. I am looking forward to see what cards will be like in a couple of years.
ReplyDeleteHehe very interesting to see how the single name thing breaks a lot of the old designs.
ReplyDeleteUD got away with it because they bought the rights to O-Pee-Chee.
ReplyDeleteI've got an '07 Topps Jim Thome from your Dime Box Dozen - I'll put it aside for you.
And the Quisenberry too!
ReplyDeleteI don't care for a lot of the recycled designs, but the Record Breakers card sure is neat.
ReplyDeleteFun post! I've wondered about which player would eventually get a card on every Topps design as well.
ReplyDeleteTopps definitely loves to recycle their old designs (especially '87) and before this year I'd been wondering what they were going to 'flash back' to in the future. Guess they don't have to worry about that!
ReplyDeleteI didn't realize that Ichiro wasn't in Topps sets for 2013 or '14. Though I dislike the repetitive use of past designs it would be cool to see a full run of all &0 sets with one player such as Ichi (or Clayton Kershaw as Night Owl as mentioned)
One missing design that I'd like to see here is 1972 Topps. Only instead of reading "MARINERS" in the marquee letters at the top it should say "ICHIRO" - it would only work for him :D
^ that should read "full run of all 70 sets" :/
ReplyDelete