Set Appreciation Post #17 - Topps Lineage

Topps Lineage is really an off-brand version of Topps Archives.

Yes, there are positives here, but I think there are limitations because of its format.  

Same general idea as far as the checklist goes, but rather than recycling a bunch of their former card designs, Topps used the same border for all the cards. Looks like something that was likely a rejected design for one of their base sets at some point.  

Here is the basic design.  

I like the photograph of Koufax, but there is just nothing really special or interesting about the design of this card. It's just not very good.  

Back of the card.  

No stats on the back. I actually like this idea for this type of set, especially given the way that Topps wrote these snippets. If you had to summarize the career of Sandy Koufax in two sentences, it would be difficult to do a better job than what is on the back of this card. The modern players are just as well done. 

The card backs are a positive for this set.  

Similar to the Koufax card, there are plenty of other older players throughout the set. 

Whoever made the set actually did a good job of picking out former players. Nice mix from all different areas. The older players, such as Tris Speaker, are generally colorized, but the card photos still look decent. The photography on the older players is another positive in Topps Lineage.  

I like that Lenny Harris makes an appearance on the Ryne Sandberg card. He's a first ballot guy if someone ever makes a Hall of Fame for utility and bench players. Also shout out to Topps for not using the cringeworthy Milwaukee Braves logo from the 1950s and 1960s, even if they used the cringeworthy Cleveland Indians logo on the modern players.  

Any set that has a subset of cards with Topps All-Star Rookie Trophies can't be all that bad, right?  

Favorite Cardinals card.  

Bob Gibson.  

Favorite former Durham Bulls card.  

Evan Longoria.  

Best non-Cardinal/non-Durham Bulls card.  

An aquward looking, 21 year-old Freddie Freeman.  

How many Braves players have baseball cards with this same pose at the Braves Spring Training Stadium?  

It's a lot.  

Topps Lineage is still not all sunshine, lollipops, and rainbows.  

There is still the ever-present horrible airbrushing. I picked out two different examples. The Adrian Beltre card is just incredibly bad. The Damon card is not quite as bad, but they airbrushed him out of a Tigers uniform, but left Jim Leyland in the background.  

If Jim Leyland were smoking in the background, I would forgive the bad airbrushing.  

Topps used the parallels from their flagship sets on the Lineage cards. A bunch of sparkles and colors that do not look very good with this card design.  

Sparkly Lou Gehrig?  

No.  

However, I do like the cloth cards based on the old Cloth Stickers. Topps had some cloth/silk parallels around in different products around this time. Good looking cards that they should consider bringing back.  

I have thought about finding all of the Cardinals and former Durham Bulls cloth sticker cards from this set, but that is somewhere way down on the list of things to do. 

Let's talk about another positive.  

The inserts are great, but similar to the Archives sets, the designs are all borrowed from older Topps products.  

There are the 2011 Rookies insert that is a copy of the 1980s Rack Pack All-Star cards.  

Hank Conger with a Hooters ad over his shoulder.  

There are 1975 Topps Minis. Miniature in real life, but not here because of the scan.  

There are also relic cards with the 1975 Topps Mini design. I am sure that there are a few floating around in one of my boxes of relics, but I am not going to go surfing for one at the moment.  

We also have the 1964 Topps Stand-Ups.  

Love the green and yellow backgrounds on these cards.  

There are also autographs. There were some decent current player autographs in this set. Early autographs of Stanton, Posey, and Freeman. I bought a box of Lineage while I was on vacation in St. Louis back in the day and ended up with a Charlie Morton autograph.  

Charlie is pretty old now, but he's had some good seasons along the way.  Solid autograph. 

The autographs of the older players are really nice. I have a few of the players who appeared for the Cardinals. I will go with Duke point guard, Dick Groat for this post.  

The 1952 Topps design has been completely overused at this point, but what are you going to do?  

HOW DOES IT COMPARE?

 Lineage is essentially a Topps Archives set. I like that they do not recycle former flagship set designs on the base cards. I think that is the biggest positive here, along with some of the autographs. There is nothing here that really stands out to me, so I am going to go with the bottom half of my rankings.

In my opinion, it is not as good as the first four sets in the bottom half of my Set Appreciation posts. So, that's below the Heritage Minors, Emotion XL, Donruss, and Bowman. I thought long and hard about how this set compares to the Ionix and Bowman Platinum set. I was tempted to put it behind both of those sets, but I think the autographs are the saving grace here. 

Yes, copying the design of the 1952 Topps set is slightly annoying, but they are good looking cards. I am ranking the Topps Lineage set 11th.  

16. 2000 Pacific Paramount Update 

15. 2010 Topps USA Baseball  

14. 2000 Topps 

13. Bowman Platinum 

12. 2000 UD Ionix

11. Topps Lineage   

10. 2002 Bowman 

9. 1988 Donruss 

8. 1995 Emotion XL 

7. 2017 Topps Heritage Minor League

6. 1998 Topps TEK 

5. 1986 Topps Mini League Leaders 

4. 2001 Fleer EX 

3. 1979 Kellogg's 

2. 2002 Topps Super Teams

1. 1983 Topps 

It's Seemed Like Small Change, But...

A post on San Jose Fuji's page last month sent me scrambling through some of my boxes to look for some of those coin cards that Topps seems to put out every year.  I am not sure what year, or set, that Topps started making the coin cards, but the Currency set from the 2003 Topps Gallery product has to be one of the earliest.

After seeing the Sasaki card on Fuji's blog, I knew that I had a few of these Currency cards hanging out somewhere, and that these might be worthy of a project.  I found a big handful of the cards including....

Musial, Willie McCovey, and even a Jackie Robinson.  There are a few others that I didn't list.  I like this Vladimir Guerrero, so this is the card I went with for my post.  That Centavo is sweet.  Seemed like a good start.  I also had a few things coming in from COMC, so I picked up another two cards on the cheap.

I picked up a Kaz Sasaki card with a Yen.....

and a Rodrigo Lopez with a Centavo.  This is a Centavo of the Mexican variety.  

After looking around on COMC, the most expensive card that I found was a copy of the Musial, which I already own.  Most expensive card checked off, the whole idea of making this set into a project was seeming like a really good idea.  

and then I did something that I usually do at the beginning of setting out on a project.  Check Ebay and looking at a checklist.  I have been using COMC a lot lately, staying away from Ebay, so the search results on Ebay were a little bit disappointing.  Namely......

a $60 Babe Ruth card.  Also there is a.......

$75 Lou Gehrig card too. 

Damn Yankees.  

When the odds are sayin' you'll never win

That's when the grin should start

Pretty doubtful my wife will be grinning if I spend $135 on two Yankees cards with coins.  Welp, I have a few nice coin cards out of the whole thing, but this is not going to be a project.  

A Venerable Old Card Part 20

One of the most famous speeches in professional sports took place on this date in 1939 when Yankees first baseman Lou Gehrig addressed the crowd at Yankee Stadium announcing his retirement from baseball.  Gehrig 's sudden retirement came after struggles in different parts of the 1938 season and coordination problems in Spring Training lead him to visit the Mayo Clinic where he was diagnosed him with ALS.  At the time the retirement ceremony was not only huge because one of the game's stars was walking away from their career at the age of 36, but the Yankees also decided to retire Gehrig's number.

While there are many jerseys hanging in Major League Baseball stadiums nowadays, Gehrig was the first player to receive such an honor.  The Yankees gave their first baseman a trophy inscribed with a poem written by New York Times writer John Kieran that cost $5 and was Gehrig's favorite possession during his final years.  It is on display at the Baseball Hall of Fame, though not very big item, it's definitely worth finding if you visit.

And then there was the speech.  I actually had a student who was a big Yankees fan who wrote a research paper on Gehrig after watching a video produced by Major League Baseball featuring all of the different starting first basemen in the league, and Derek Jeter who was the Yankees team captain, reciting lines of the speech.  Here is the video....

Curiously, there is not an actual video of the whole Lou Gehrig speech in existence in its entirety.  A little weird that nobody got it on film, but it explains why Major League Baseball had the video above made with modern players reading the speech.  

As a card collector I cannot say that I am going to go out of my way to collect Gehrig cards since they are well out of my price range, but I have still found a few of the years that I really enjoy having in my collection.  Here are my two favorites.....

This card looks a lot like a 1972 Kellogg's card, but it's actually from the 1970 Rold Gold All-Time Baseball Greats Set.  The words "All-Time Baseball Greats" do not appear on the Kellogg's cards and the date on the back of the card is obviously different.  I like the Kellogg's set a lot and have picked up a lot of the cards over the last few years.  I was introduced to the Rold Gold set at a card show about a year and a half ago.  

There is something really cool about having a player from the 1930s pictured on a plastic card that came in a bag of pretzels in the early 1970s.  Clearly more modern than the baseball cards of the 1930s, but they have a great picture of Gehrig with the iconic facade of the Yankee Stadium grandstand in the background.  Just a really well made card.  

My second Gehrig card is even more modern, but very classy looking....

There are tons of these modern cards sets with old players and paintings.  Some are done very poorly, some are done very well.  The Masterpieces sets were easily some of the best baseball card products in the old players/paintings set that have become really common.  Easily a set I could take out of its box in my card closet, flip through, and just look at the commons.  

Complete Set: 2013 Topps Gypsy Queen

At some point at the beginning of the year I made a promise to focus on and show more completed sets on this space.  I started off great with my pursuit of a few cards for my 1998 Topps Tek set, but quickly got stuck on a Jason Kendall card.  Funny how one card got me side-tracked, but I recently landed the card which quickly reminded me of my goal.  No ADD or anything to see here.  In the meantime, I have actually finished a few sets, but have not posted the results on here yet.  Today is my first, in what should be, a long line of posts this year showing off a completed set.

2013 Topps Gypsy Queen Adam Jones

This is actually the third completed set I have finished from the 2013 baseball card releases behind the Topps base set and Topps Heritage.  Gypsy Queen is a 330 card set with 250 base cards and 50 short prints.  There are variations among the base set cards, but I did not get into finding all of the variations and super short print variations.  Not this year.  I actually did not open a hobby box of Gypsy Queen, but started out with a pair of Blasters I bought myself for Easter and then traded for one large lot of cards and bought a few smaller lots.  In the end, it is a nice looking set and a welcome addition to my big closet of cards.  Here are a few highlights from the set:

2013 Topps Gypsy Queen Lou Gehrig Mini 

The mini cards have been a big hit for Topps over the years and the Gypsy Queen set is full of minis.  I did not actually complete all of the minis yet, so I do not truly have a master set, but I am not gaga over miniature cards.  I always like picking up a few of these for every set, but the only mini set I ever finish every year is the Topps base set minis.  There are a few other insert sets in Gypsy Queen that I like besides the minis.  

2013 Topps Gypsy Queen Sandy Koufax No-Hitters 

My favorite overall insert set in Gypsy Queen is the No-Hitters insert.  The cards have a nice design and they highlight different no-hitters thrown over the years by pitchers from yesteryear and current Major Leaguers.  The backs of the cards feature the details surrounding the no-hitters.  I was a little bit disappointed that the Jose Jimenez no-hitter against the Diamondbacks in 1999 was not featured, but Sandy Koufax is cool too.  I would also recommend the Glove Works, Collisions at the Plate, and Sliding Stars inserts sets too.  Really well done.  

So what's my favorite card from the entire Gypsy Queen set: 

2013 Topps Gypsy Queen Collisions At The Plate Yadier Molina 

This Yadier Molina card is really sweet and I was excited that Topps gave him an insert card.  Look around, they are seriously lacking.  Anyway, at first glance I thought this card might be from last season when Molina has quite the collision at the plate with the Pirates Josh Harrison.  However, that collision took place in Pittsburgh.  The card shows Molina wearing red catchers gear, which he wears at home, and the Pittsburgh player has a road uniform and is wearing the jersey number 19 and not Harrison's 5. After doing some research into the collisions of Yadier Molina I found this picture:  

The card fits the picture to a tee and actually took place during Molina's rookie season of 2005.  The Pirates player is current Cardinal (my least favorite one) Ty Wigginton who was tagged out on the play.  I am happy that Topps gave Molina an insert card, finally, and showed a cool play.  Glad a stumbled across this card and helped me finish up the Collisions at the Plate insert set.