Highlights from 3 Boxes of 2023 Topps Holiday Baseball

I don't feel much like posting tonight, but I don't want to lose steam on this blogging thing before I even really get restarted. I've been thinking today about my hobby goals moving forward, trying to find a direction before I let the wind take me too far off course. Kind of surprising to me, the most compelling projects on my mind involve vintage cards, such as completing my Wally Moon master set and building the rest of my Allen & Ginter Prize & Game Chickens set. I haven't thought of a lot that I'd like to accomplish with current products. I think the prices on current wax have got me a little down on modern cards at the moment. There are still fun products to be had, though, like my annual dive into the Topps Holiday Baseball set, which takes a stars and rookies approach to the current year's Topps design and adds snowflakes. I acquired 3 boxes of it to open. Here are the highlights. 

The Metallic Snowflake parallels fall about 5 per box. These were 6 of my best pulls from the lot. Nothing really notable as far as my collecting interests go, but I guess that's what you get when you bust packs sometimes.

These were the best of the holiday photo variation cards I pulled. Again, nothing too astounding. I think my favorite of the bunch is Bobby Witt Jr in a Santa hat. I recall him absolutely killing the Astros in a late-season series that they needed to win last year. Or at least in one of the games I watched it seemed like he was hurting them every time he was involved in a play.

It seems that 99% of the time you pull a base relic as the promised hit in these boxes. I'm not too concerned about the hits in this product, as I mostly enjoy collating the set each year. I did pull a Santa hat relic one year, which is the best hit I've gotten out of Holiday across at least 30-40 boxes over the years. If I recall correctly, it was a Kris Bryant card numbered /25. Arguably the hit of this break is the Gunnar Henderson relic card. The Orioles made some noise last year and might be on the upswing while some of the other AL East teams flounder a bit. Maybe. I'm no baseball analyst.

Plenty of duplication among the base cards mean I am far from a base set still, which is my primary goal when it comes to Topps Holiday. Luckily the boxes are relatively cheap and often plentiful, so I may be able to fill this checklist out before too long. If I were more ambitious I'd chase a Metallic Snowflake parallel set as a challenge, but that's probably a step too far for what is essentially a gimmick winter release.

2017 Topps National Baseball Card Day Set

August 12th was Topps' proclaimed National Baseball Card Day, and people who visited card shops on that day could get packs from a special set Topps created for the occasion. I didn't visit my local shop on that day, as my local shop is inconvenient to visit and I have a hard time justifying the markup they charge over internet prices. I also get a weird vibe from the owner that I don't like. The best thing about visiting the local shop is petting the dog, but sometimes the dog bites me.

Anyway, I bought a set of the 2017 National Baseball Card Day cards from an eBay seller. There are 30 cards in the set, one for each team in Major League Baseball. There were also stadium giveaway sets and autographs seeded randomly in packs, but I only picked up the base set. Carlos Correa was the Astros' representative in the set.

The checklist contains an assortment of veterans and rookies. I picked a few of them to scan here. Most of these guys have completed their season for the 2017, hoping for a better run next year.

The representative from the Angels, Mike Trout, wasn't available from packs. You had to spend $10 on Topps products at the card shop to get this card. I got it as part of my eBay purchase. This is a pretty neat little set. I sometimes feel guilty for shopping online instead of supporting the local shop, but maybe if I fit in better with the owner and clientele I would feel more motivated to pay the premium for their products.

A New Era in Oddballs!

Like many in the card blogging world, I like oddball card releases. When I was young it seemed like you couldn't turn around without finding a new baseball card set in a cereal box or attached to a snack. In recent years, though, the frequency of these card releases slowed way down. This year Topps has shown an increased effort to get cardboard out into the marketplace through alternate channels, releasing daily print-to-demand highlight cards and oddball sets tied to merchandise.

A couple months ago, Topps released a 50-card set that could be found in Wal-Mart's Marketside pizzas and breadsticks. I picked up a full set of them from an eBay seller and also busted a couple packs for my blog. They featured a brand new design and I think they were pretty well-received by bloggers in general.

More recently, Topps announced that it would be doing a promotion in partnership with New Era and LIDS. Anyone buying a New Era MLB cap at a participating LIDS store can receive one pack of four trading cards featuring 9 different MLB players who are also ambassadors for New Era caps. There are supposedly relics, relic / autos, and parallels included at astronomical odds. A few relics have popped up on eBay, but I haven't seen any of the parallels and I wonder if they actually exist. The relic / autos are numbered # 1 / 1, so there is a good reason they haven't popped up yet.

I didn't actually buy hats to get my cards. I didn't want to pay the prices these sets are going for on eBay, so I bought a partial set at a discounted price and then added the singles I needed to finish it out. I wound up paying much less than the going rate of about $50 for my 9-card set. If you multiply out the pack odds on these things you come up with a pretty astronomical print run for the base cards, but I can't help wondering how many of them will actually come to market or escape being tossed in the trash by hat-buyers who aren't card collectors. I still probably overpaid even after shopping around a little bit, but it's easy to get caught up in the wave of new oddball releases.

Although Topps reused the base card design from the 2016 Topps flagship set for these cards, they did at least swap the photos out on them. A couple of these players (Stroman, Betances) didn't appear in Series 1, so I am just assuming the photos are different from their Series 2 cards. That set released today or maybe yesterday, and I haven't seen any of it yet.

I think the reason for a lot of the photo changes is that the batters needed to be shown in the field or otherwise wearing caps instead of batting helmets or no headgear at all, because of the tie-in with the New Era brand. You want to show off the merchandise.

Part of me wanted to go buy a hat and get a pack of cards, but I have two caps (Houston Astros, Denver Broncos) that I never wear at all. When I was a kid I worked on our farm and neighboring farms, so I always had a hat to wear, usually a Houston Rockets cap. I wore caps fairly often after I left home and went to college, too, and again when I worked on the freight dock for FedEx. Once I got an office job, though, I got out of the habit and I haven't worn a cap much for years. It's hard to justify buying a new hat when I have two very nice ones that are still almost new several years after I bought them. 

I am interested to see what Topps comes up with next on the oddball front. It is a marketing gimmick that appears to work, although I am a bad example when it comes to actually making the purchases that encourage this sort of thing. I did walk by a stack of Marketside pizzas the other day and I nearly bought one even though I already have the card set. I also at least considered going to buy a New Era hat, something I hadn't thought about for years. I guess in a secondary kind of way I have supported these promotions, as someone had to buy at least 16.67 pizzas or breadsticks and 2.25 caps for me to obtain these sets.

My only real gripe with these New Era cards is the reuse of the design from the regular Topps set. It would have been cool to see something different, like we got with the Wal-Mart pizza cards. It's not a huge complaint, but I like to see some variety in my card offerings.

I am a sucker for these card sets, so I am liable to be interested in whatever Topps comes up with next. Although Panini's holiday-themed sets aren't really what I consider to be oddballs, their Father's Day set is coming out soon and I think this Saturday I will be visiting my somewhat local card shop to get a couple of Father's Day packs. I can't decide what I should spend my money on there, though, as unopened wax hasn't really been on my radar much lately. I am leaning toward Star Wars Evolution or Topps Series 2, but if the promotion requires me to actually buy Panini product I will likely walk out empty-handed. Maybe if they have some Donruss basketball I will think about it. Right now my card shop's Facebook event simply says that every visitor gets one free pack and one additional pack for each $14 they spend, so there is a good chance that purchases of non-Panini products will qualify toward Father's Day packs. Whatever the case, if I get any of the cards I will be posting the breaks here. I am hoping to get some of the new NASCAR content that Panini has teased.