By: William Robinson
Welcome to Junk Era 2.0 or Welcome to Wandermania
Choose your own adventure
Do you all remember those awesome choose your own adventure books? The ones where the protagonist would have a decision to make and then you could flip to a different page depending on what you though they should do? Well Topps 2022 baseball cards are kind of like that.
During the pandemic it was nearly impossible to find cards of any sport on the shelf. Flippers were going around from Walmart to Target to Walgreens buying up boxes upon boxes of product and then were selling them from the parking lot or their trunk or their parent’s basements. This was in due part to the huge surge of demand for the product. Now whether that meant that more people were collecting baseball cards or that people were just bored. It did show that there was a hunger for baseball cards. Since then, for every release the supply has tried to increase to meet that demand and so for Topps 2022 series 1 that supply is going to be at an all-time high. If you compare the insertion ratio for gold parallels from 2019 to 2022 you will see that in 2019 the ratio was 1 per 5 packs. Now it’s 1 per 38. So, without any other considerations (factory sets, etc) you can estimate that Topps is now printing at least 8 times more cards than it did in 2019. What will that do to the hobby? I’m not certain. If you want to choose ruin, go to page 58, if you want to choose success keep reading.
This is also the rookie set for one Wander Franco. Wander Franco is said to be the next coming of Mike Trout. Last year for the Tampa Bay Rays in only 70 games he was worth 3.5 WAR. He had an OPS+ 129 and was by all accounts pretty amazing. He’s the first can’t miss prospect since Ohtani, Acuna and Soto. His rookie card is set to be the most sought-after card on the market. Parallels are going to be worth a ton, especially since they are going to be quite difficult to pull. This is going to cause a craze that we haven’t seen since Ken Griffey Jr. I predict that the flippers are going to be out in full force and buying up all the retail that they can find and anyone that is lucky enough to find cards should buy them even if the cards are vastly over printed. The goal is to pull a parallel. Also, that being said some undervalued Franco cards may be the rookie inserts. They are going to be tough pulls as well and well under printed compared to his base rookie, but I suspect that they are going to be worth less initially than his base rookie. So, you may want to go online and snag a few of those.
Now let’s move on to the actual set. I bought a hobby box and a jumbo hobby box for opening day. If you want to watch me open them, you can go to my you tube channel all sorts of shenanigans. For now, though let me say this. I was less than impressed.
This is the base design of the set. I would say that it’s a very clean card. The names are big enough to be easily read and the card has easy to judge borders so you can tell the centering on your card. The colors are vibrant, and the pictures are well done. Many of the cards are featuring players in throwback uniforms which is a nice touch. My only complaint is that you can’t easily read the position of the player as it’s in a faded white lettering on the second row of the card. The back of the card is a very typical Topps base card. However, I will say this: the numbers are not uniformly located on the cards. Some are printed at the top and others are at the bottom which makes sorting difficult for set builders.
Inserts are not common in this product. Each pack does not contain inserts and even the most common inserts the ‘87 Topps inserts are included at only 1 per 3 packs or so. These inserts are a callback to the 1987 Woodgrain set and are extremely nostalgic for those of us like me that this was our introduction set to card collecting. That being said they’ve done a fair number of callbacks to this set in the past several years and this one is not that special.
The next most common insert is a Welcome to the Show insert. This insert is about 1 per 8 packs or so and is pretty okay. I wouldn’t say it’s special or even visually appealing but it’s a typical Topps insert.
There are two different insert sets that are less common but still attainable that I feel like I should mention. The first is Flashiest feet, which is obviously inspired by panini noir’s shoe cards. These are pretty interesting cards that haven’t been done before in Topps and so I could see them being somewhat collectible. That being said it’s going to be a boom or bust insert and is included at about 1 per 12 boxes.
And finally, is the diamond greats insert set. This set is about one per box and is a die cut set. They are very dope looking cards and something that I would be very interested in putting a set together of. That being said at one per box that’s going to be pretty difficult. Still, it’s the best insert set of the series.
After opening up the two hobby options for this set, I was only 14 cards away from putting together two base sets. My hits were a relic of Aaron Judge and Rafael Devers and Fernando Tatis and my autograph was of a player that I had never heard of. I spent more than I’d like to admit for these two boxes and didn’t get nearly the value out of it that I spent. My feelings on this product are as follows: It’s not going to be worth much. You heard me right it’s a huge cash grab and with the print runs being this high there are going to be boxes of this product that aren’t going to merit 10% return on investment. It’s going to be nearly impossible to pull a good parallel and the market right now isn’t valuing inserts. From a fun standpoint the sorting of this set is abysmal. The cards are flipped every which way in packs and the numbers are on random sides. When you put the set in a binder in sheets it looks like very little thought went into how the cards would look on the pages. Personally, I miss the sets where the cards were organized by team. I feel like this set could deal with some organization in and of itself. It would be nice to not have to search for all the braves cards. It would also be nice to be able to look at the cards in a binder and not see cards organized in different directions right next to each other.
This set though is very much a choose your own adventure set. You could easily get excited about the chase of Wander Franco and the difficulty that is going to be involved in pulling a hotly pursued parallel or you could look at it as a hot steaming pile of trash that is overprinted and under thought of. At the end of the day, it’s probably a little bit of both.