Well, this is a little awkward. I did not make a single post about my progress in finishing my 2001 Topps Archives set, but I am sitting here with all of the cards needed to finish the set sitting here on my desk ready to put into a box to make up the finished set. How did I get there? A few trades, a seller who knocked a bunch of cards down to basically nothing on COMC, and then a few singles off of the Burbank Cards Ebay store and this set is ready to move over and become the first one over on the Completed Sets tab.
Here's a quick run down on the set......
The set came out during the summer of 2001 as a part of the 50th Anniversary of Topps. Archives came out in two series with which each featuring a group of players, a few managers, and some other assorted postseason highlights cards and the whatnot that were all reprints. The players in the set all had two cards: their first and their last. It created a fairly good mixture of older cards and newer cards. Basically anything from the 1950s through the late 1990s.
Two bigs knocks on the set.
First, Topps did some mangling of players rookie cards. Especially those who appeared on prospect cards with multiple players. Even when there were multiple worth while names on the card. Case in point....
The Cecil Cooper rookie card in the set appears as a stand alone card. In reality, the original card featured two other Red Sox rookies including a fairly talented catcher named Carlton Fisk.
Kind of a classic card from the early 1970s. It's sort of a shame that Topps did not just put this card into the set as is. Heck, even Mike Garman was an average player who stuck around for 9 years in the Majors and pitched more than 300 games.
The second knock on the set is the card numbering. Since the cards in this set were reprinted, Topps left the original number at the top of the card. The numbering for the set is actually microscopically printed on the back of the card in different places. I guess they really tried to make it as close to the original as possible, which meant squeezing card numbers into whatever space was around.
The card number on this 1987 Vida Blue reprint is above the bio line at the bottom of the card and his high school football factoid. This is one of the easier ones to read. Cards with dark backs, like the 1976 Topps cards, can come close to causing blindness.
In all, I added 81 cards from this set since I started working towards its completion in April. The stack looks a little something like this.....
I pulled out my box with the partial set. It appears that I probably should have used a bigger box for this set. Looks like I am going to sort these into a completed set and then rebox the cards....
My tab on the completed set project will be updated and another project will be posted later in the week.
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