2019 Topps Series 1 Review

By: William Robinson

Every year my daughter and I open a jumbo box of each series of Topps baseball. This is a tradition that I’ve done her entire life and one that I plan on continuing. Although, after this season of Topps I’m not too sure if that’s going to be as long as her life. I started collecting baseball cards in 1987 with my father. At that time the card industry was in a boom. Topps, Donruss and Fleer were producing untold numbers of millions of cards in now what is know as the “junk era”. The card industry was soon to fall flat on its face. Though we didn’t realize that at the time and honestly as a child of 7 I didn’t much care about the financial futures of the baseball card industry. All I cared about was the time that I was spending with my father. However, those two were intrinsically linked.  In 1994 when the strike shut down the season, not only was baseball shut down, baseball card collecting and my father collecting them also shut down. He would never return to baseball card collecting and it only took his death and the dispersment of his collection for me to return. The strike cost me that way of bonding with him and now another strike may be on the horizon. The CBA ends in 2021 and I’m dreading that a labor impasse may do again what it did in 1994 and get rid of a way that I bond with my loved ones.

You may ask yourself, “what does this have to do with 2019 Topps series 1?”. Well it ties the two together because Topps Series 1 is a junk product. Many may tie this set-in fact as the one that made it painfully obvious that we were in another junk era of baseball cards. This argument has been floating around baseball card collecting circles for some time and only the most dedicated of baseball card seller will defend the hobby from naysayers. Frankly speaking just like in the junk era there are just too many baseball cards being produced and so little of them have any value moving forward. You take that and pair it with a strike in major league baseball and you have the beginnings of a large crash that may be coming.

I opened one Jumbo box of Series 1 with my daughter and two Silver packs that the card shop gave out with it to entice people to buy. Let me say this: Thank God they are giving out those silver packs because they are more valuable than the entirety of the jumbo boxes that I have seen. I paid 108 dollars for my Jumbo box, (you can get them for 94 dollars online, but I wanted to support local business) and truth be told I may have gotten 25.00 worth of cards out of the box, and that’s being generous. My “hits” were a Sean Reid Foley 1984 Topps rookie card insert autograph, a Freddie Freeman replica hat emblem card numbered to 199, and a Carlos Correa bat card. Now I may be undervaluing those cards but…. Honestly, I don’t think I am. Honestly, I’d do better to hurry up and put them on the market now before the shine wears off on them.

Topps made a conscious decision to hold a lot of good cards out of the Jumbo boxes this year.  The clear inserts, the Independence Day inserts, the SP cards and many of the good autographs and relic cards are hobby box only and not available in Jumbo boxes (although they didn’t tell anyone that would be the case). Jumbo boxes are only good because you are guaranteed an autograph but many of those autographs are very underwhelming in what is a very poor rookie class. There is also a greater chance that you may get an entire base set but, in this day, and age very few people collect sets and as I opened the boxes it felt like there were a lot of duplicates which makes me nervous about whether or not I got a complete set. I have seen several of these boxes opened now and they are all about the same as well. There just isn’t any possibility of getting your money back out of a random jumbo box of this product and I guarantee these things will drop in price after the shine wears off on them.

But for those of you who are determined to buy at least some of this product (like I was). Here is my review of the actual cards and not their value.  The Base cards are very dull looking. The cards look off-center and the way that the bottom name is the player’s first name is very confusing for new fans of the game as it looks like their last name should be said first. The pictures are not dynamic on the card and the borders aren’t interesting at all. The only thing that I can say that I like is the team cards, which feature a picture of the stadium and when the stadium was built on the front of the card and on the back the players on the team and how they finished in 2018. The inserts aren’t much better. This year marks the 150^th year of baseball and so Topps is celebrating that by having 150 years of baseball inserts. A massive undertaking at 150 cards this insert set is nearly going to be impossible to put together. There are 150-year stamped cards which were supposed to be rare but appeared in one per jumbo pack. There is also again a reprint set thrown in there which absolutely nobody wants. Topps has been putting reprint sets in each of its sets for the past several years and I haven’t heard a fan of them yet. There is a Topps Now card insert set which basically serves as an advertisement for their Topps Now line (which I loathe). 1984 throwback inserts are included this season which are kind of fun to look at but as that was before my time and not one of my favorite looking sets anyways, I don’t have much interest in those either. Retail it appears gets better inserts with the history of Spring Training cards which are quite beautiful, and a history of Ronald Acuna set which would be fun to have as a Braves fan. The only bright spots are the foil cards which really pop compared to the boring base cards and the Independence Day cards again are a red white and blue masterpiece. Though both of those are not good enough to drive someone to purchase this monstrosity.

Topps really messed up with this product. They sold it to breakers as the usual good deal, but then gave them this product which is basically a rip off in every box. This is going to aggravate fans and make them not want to purchase base Topps in the future. I can see many people who are new to the hobby buying this as an introductory box and then getting a bad taste in their mouths and never buying a box again. This is a bad move for the baseball card industry and for baseball in general. This along with the idea that this may be a second junk era for cards puts them ever closer to the edge of a cliff that they may not be able to climb up from.

Now insiders in the industry will say that this is a golden age of cards. Ardent sellers who make their money off cards will tell you that more and more people are buying into cards and that the variety in sets is good for the market. They state that this is nothing like the junk era of cards and that the relative scarcity of each individual set is what will prevent the market from crashing again. I honestly am not so sure. To me it doesn’t feel like there is any card that is scarce other than the extremely limited numbered and variety cards. Those cards cannot drive the market though. A card that you have nearly no chance of pulling in a product cannot drive you to spend dollar after dollar on. It must be something that you get to have from time to time that drives the market. It must be the base rookies and honestly that’s not happening with Topps Series 1. There just aren’t enough good rookies in the product to make it worth-while and if Topps is going to remove most of the inserts from the Jumbo’s then that’s a product that is going to have NO value. I could easily see these boxes sitting on shelves for years and years to come and eventually being marked down to 40 bucks each.

Those of us on the train with this industry should be a little bit nervous. There is a tunnel coming in the future. The CBA ends in 2021 and there is a strong possibility of a work stoppage. Topps cannot afford to shed fans of its hobby and baseball cannot afford to shed fans of the sport prior to this work stoppage if it hopes to survive after it. Creating a product like 2019 Topps Series 1 risks alienating fans and hurting the hobby going forward. I worry that Topps doesn’t realize that the tunnel that they may be driving towards is just a big black dot drawn on the side of the mountain and that there is a crash coming.