Rainbow in the Dark 38: Wa(i)vering Enthusiasm

The Astros have continued to make moves in an effort to bolster a roster that took a step back in 2016 after a promising playoff run in 2015. A couple of those moves will have some kind of effect on my player collections. First baseman/designated hitter Jon Singleton was placed on waivers a couple of days ago, dropping him from the 40-man roster. He will probably be relegated to AAA, and this is a sign that the team might be ready to move on from him completely. There is still a chance that he could play for the Astros in the future, or that another team might show interest in him. It's hard to remember that he is still pretty young, so he might yet pull it together. He hasn't had a lot of cardboard recently, though, so most of my Singleton additions have been parallels from base Topps sets or filling in holes from older releases.

I don't know for certain, but this Pink parallel from 2015 Topps Series Two might be the last non-1/1 card I needed for the 2015 rainbow. It is numbered # 30 / 50. There could be variations still missing from my collection, but I know I've got most of them, including minis, 5x7's, online-exclusives, and all the packed-out parallels.

I saw the other day that this year Topps has released special holiday parallels with snowflakes where the corner 'fog' in the 2016 design would go. I gathered a few of Singleton's 2016 parallels, but there are so many out there. I'm glad I didn't make it my quest to get the full-blown rainbow of his 2016 base issue. I guess there is still time to go for it, but even from 2015 to 2016 it seems there was a large jump in the number of hard-to-get variations, with a great many of them exclusive to one retailer or only available as part of a complete set purchase on the Topps website. Instead of chasing them all, I have given the whole thing a miss unless something cool pops up in my (cheap) price range.

The seller on the Singleton card included a stack of 2015 Topps Football cards as packaging. I haven't really kept up with football cards lately, so it was interesting to look at the card designs and players. I probably wouldn't normally have scanned these, but when I purchased this Singleton card there wasn't much news about him on the airwaves and I thought I would need some post filler.

The design is pretty busy on these. It took me a while to figure out what was going on with those numbers on the front of some cards, as they didn't match jersey numbers. It turns out they are part of a subset called Topp 60, which I presume is some attempt at ranking the top sixty players in the league.

Here are the backs of some cards. You can see the Topp 60 write-ups on some of them. It's a cool idea. It's a subset that I would enjoy collecting if football cards were more of a thing for me. I imagine the Topp 60 is heavily weighted toward the marquee offensive positions, without many linemen or defensive players on the checklist. You have to go where the collector money is, and that usually means quarterbacks, wide receivers, running backs, and the occasional great tight end or J.J. Watt-caliber defender.