Dave, Dick, and Dump Trucks of Money.

     Word came in baseball this week of two things I am very happy about, to the point that I am posting about it. 

     Firstly, that Dave Parker and Dick Allen were elected to the hall of fame. These two men are long overdue to be in Cooperstown. Parker was a great player with a sublime peak.  His great downfall to those pesky writers was he may or may not have enjoyed cocaine a little too much. But hey, in the 1980s, it was the law to do cocaine once you made a certain amount of money and after all, he was the first player to make a million dollars in a year. 

 

I hate to play the if/then game when it comes to the hall of fame, but if Jim Rice and Harold Baines are in Cooperstown, then there was zero reason to keep Parker out. 

His pages in my book are also a fun way to see how my brain works in terms of organization. That first page has him all in a Pirates uni - where he began his career and made his biggest contributions as a player (Stargell was the leader but Parker was the most dangerous hitter). That makes sense. He then was traded to Cincy after the Pittsburgh drug trials, so maybe that next page would be all Reds cards, well not quite. You see mostly Reds but also cards that match cards on the other pages. 

Parker did bounce around a lot at the end of his career, didn't he?  Have bat, will travel. I am glad the veterans committee, or whatever they are calling it this week, came to their senses and immortalized a great player while he was still alive. The same cannot be said for poor Dick Allen. 

He died in 2020 and he belonged in the hall way before that.  His numbers are the perfect illustration of why you need to "normalize" for era. He did all his damage in the 60s and early 70s, when pitching dominated the league. He also committed the cardinal sin of being an outspoken black man in the 60s when all the writers were stuffy old white dudes and Philadelphia was not exactly into loving the brothers. So his family will get to enjoy his enshrinement but he will not.  They did this more recently to Ron Santo as well, so I can't decide if this move is pulling a Santo or pulling an Allen.  The opposite is waiting until a player dies because they don't deserve to reap the benefits of being a hall of fame member; this is now pulling a Rose but someday will probably be pulling a Bonds. 

The second thing that happened is that the Mets backed up the dump truck full of money and unloaded it in the yard of Juan Soto. 

Fun fact: the two world series MVPs in Mets history also wore #22

This signing is obviously a very expensive undertaking for my hometown team to partake in and it is also unique for them.  The Mets usually make big trades for big players (Carter, Alomar, Piazza, Lindor) and then sign them to big deals but have never really signed the prime free agent for the right reasons. The only other time this happened was with the now infamous Bobby Bonilla and they did that as a knee jerk reaction to not signing Darryl Strawberry - when they should have either just given Straw the money or waited a year and paid Barry Bonds. And we all know how Bobby Bonilla turned out in Mets history.  But here they have signed the "generational talent" (they passed on A-Rod) to the biggest contract (and outspending the Yankees to do it) and it actually has a chance to work out for a change, both as a player and his fit on the team. I am hopeful, but with the Mets, it is always tainted with caution.

Retro Fun.

       It is safe to say most of us reached retro card saturation sometime in the early to mid-aughts.  The Topps Archives and Topps Heritage sets in 2001 begat Upper Deck's Vintage and Decades series and opened up a floodgate of reprints, design reuse, and pseudo-retro sets.  Sometimes it is refreshing and neat but most of the time it is gratuitous and poorly executed.  And since Topps keeps pumping out their Heritage and revamped Archives sets over and and over, year after year, we get very little variation in the presentation of our nostalgia.

Enter Topps Super 70s Sports Baseball.  If you recognize the name and follow this dude on twitter, you know the whole tongue-in-cheek schtick this feed has.  It posts multiple retro photos a day with an amusing over-the-top caption to it to inflict an emotional response: sometimes good, sometimes bad, sometimes ridiculous.  When I saw they had teamed up with Topps to put out a card set, I couldn't resist.  Lemme tell you, they had me at the graphic on the box:

When I saw the design of the cards, I knew immediately that they were going for someone like me who wants the vibe of old school cards but not the horrible repetition the whole parade has become.  If you are as much of a card nerd as I am (and if you are reading this blog, I assume you are) you recognized the elements right away: The script team logo from 1978, the pennant flag from 1977, and the ribbon from 1979 (or 1974 perhaps?) all remixed and reorganized into something organic and new.  It's like hearing a perfect cover version of a popular overplayed song that makes the whole thing come alive again.

The "pack" was actually a plastic box sealed with tamper tape. Very interesting indeed.

 

 

I pre-ordered this stuff, which I NEVER do even for Ginter or Heritage, back in early November.  I got a late Christmas present when they arrived on Boxing Day.  And yup, I love them as much as I thought I would.

 

First and foremost, new photos!  One of the huge complains I and so many other collectors is when they put old guys on new cards, they use the same pictures over and over and over and over again.  I know I have written about it and I know other bloggers have too so when I see new shots from the no doubt bottomless pile Topps should have, it makes me very happy indeed.  The other thing I noticed right away is that they feel right.  The vintage cardboard is always a plus on these sets. I know shiny white glossy paper looks better but when you are doing this sort of thing, it really should be thick and pulpy and dull.  It makes the backs look right too:

 

I probably should have scanned more backs but the cartoons are wonderful and they look new though someone with more knowledge than me could probably figure out if they are reused.  Either way, they let a third of the back be the comic and I am more than okay with that.  The backs themselves are in the color scheme of 1977 or 1979 with the ribbon from '79 featured.  I was kind of expecting the humorous tone of the S70sS Twitter feed in the write-up but they are pretty straight forward.  I doubt Topps would want to alienate anyone with a Kevin Costner joke on the back of a Cal Ripken card (google it).

Lets look at all of these beauties.  I even got a nice little hit:

 

 

That's a Dave Parker autograph in the middle there.  I didn't have a Cobra signature in my collection so that one is going to stay.  The last two cards are themed parallels that add the colorful banners of 1975 to the mix.  I think it might have been too much to ask for the whole set to look like that so that is a nice addition and kinda what parallels should do in the first place.  I might need to look into making an entire page of the Magnificent Mustaches. 

They did modern players in the set too, which is fine I guess but certainly not what I came to see.  Scherzer and Turner certainly fit in with a 70s theme, Cole and Soto, not so much.  Full disclosure: I am easily old enough to be Juan Soto's dad.

 

 

You may count more than 20 cards, that's because I also pre-ordered my favorite players, the Gary Carter, the Frank Thomas, the Mike Piazza (amusingly shown in his Marlins uniform), and of course the Mets players there on the bottom.  A wise decision since I didn't get any of them in my 20-card box.  These cards are easily the collecting highlight of the dumpster fire that has been 2020.  If you were on the fence about getting any of this stuff because you don't like all the faux-vintage that gets churned out, I suggest it highly.  I hope Topps learns from this and does more fun sets like this rather than just reprinting all their old cards.