A Venerable Old Card Part 9

Topps has been pumping up a new product the first two weeks of the baseball season called Topps Now.  The cards can only be bought online, for $9.99, and collectors only have 24 hours to purchase the cards.  Player selection for the cards is based on actual performance in games.  Seems like kind of a cool idea, but I am having a hard time moving past the whole $9.99 thing for a single card.

Seriously, they have had players that I have been interested in collecting, but $9.99?  Jamie Garcia had a card the other day, I thought it would be cool, but $9.99.  Today, there is a card of Melvin, formerly B.J. from the Durham Bulls, Upton.  Sigh.  $9.99.

Which brings me to my old card of the week.  If you have read my last two posts since I have returned to blogging I have told countless tales of sorting out old sets.  Somewhere someone is rolling their eyes thinking "not another card sorting story", but that's exactly what you are going to get right now.

My wife spent a few hours last week helping me sort out some of my early and mid 1980s sets.  Every time I would pull a set of Topps cards from one of the years, she would start sorting, and stop when she came across a card she thought did not fit.  Almost every stop involved the same type of card from my childhood.  Anyone remember these?

If only I had a wax wrapper from my childhood at the moment.  Back in the olden days, before the internet, Topps had offers on the back of their wax wrappers which offered a pack of 5 All-Star cards for a bunch of wrappers and a five dollar check from your mom.  Much better deal to get a Pedro Guerrero, Jim Rice, and few others for $5 than a Melvin Upton for $9.99.  My brother and I always ended up with a bunch of these at the end of the summer.  If they had cost $9.99 for a single card my mother would have never sent the check in for me.  I never put together a full set of them as a kid, but as an adult I finished off the 1985 mail-ins.

A look at the back of the card....

Most of my non-1985 cards are a pretty random bunch of cards.  For some reason I do not have any Cardinals, but I have players like Pedro Guerrero who ended up spending time on the Cardinals.  Out of all the mail-in cards I found the past week this card has to be my favorite.  Given the wear on the corners of the cards I am guessing the seven year old me liked this card too.

Anyway,  I might have to make one of these old mail in sets a project for sometime in the future.  I can probably buy the whole mail in set for less money than the $9.99 for the Topps Now cards.  Anyone else doing the Topps Now cards?