Featured Cards: 2012 Topps #634, José Contreras; 2012 Topps 1987 Minis #TM-59, Cliff Lee; 2012 Topps #353, John Mayberry, Jr.; 2012 Topps Phillies Team Set #PHI7, John Mayberry, Jr.; 2012 Topps #345, Jonathan Papelbon; 2012 Topps Phillies Team Set #PHI17, Citizens Bank Park
Over the past few days, I’ve been posting checklists for the Series Two 2012 Topps insert sets. Sadly, Topps doesn’t seem to know when to stop with the inserts, and even though I have already posted 13 new checklists for 2012 Topps, I am still far from finished. Scarily, when including the Series One inserts, I currently count 26 insert set checklists posted for the product. I refuse to look at the rough edits for the lists I haven’t posted yet, but I think that it will be roughly 35 inserts when I have completed all the work caused by Series Two. Even more frightening: there are insert sets in which no Phillies appear. I don’t want to make the calculation, but it would not surprise me at all to find out that the total number of cards (not counting parallels) comprising the insert sets actually exceeds the number of cards in the actual Topps base set. That’s hard to do when the base set is 661 cards (not counting variations). That is just wrong.
But, I digress.
Unfortunately, due to the two-series 
nature of the Topps flagship brand, a couple of the checklists — in particular, the base set and the 1987 Minis — are actually edited. While making the necessary additions, I also included some updates in the Additional Information section and, in the case of the 2012 Topps base set, added a “14,000 Phillies Commentary” section. Unfortunately, I found out the hard way that in WordPress you just cannot update the publication date for a post. If you do so, all the links you have to the original version of the post become invalid. So, rather than updating and correcting an obscene number of links, just to publish new versions of those checklists, here are the direct links to them:
But before I resume with the insert checklists, I have some choice words about Series Two Topps and its relationship with this year’s Topps Phillies Team Set. Starting with their first Phillies Team Set blister pack back in 2006, Topps has consistently included at least one card with a photo that differed from the photo used in the regular Topps set. There are a number of reasons for liking this, one of the most important of these is that it helps to justify that cost of buying a team set in which the majority of the cards are identical to what you get in the regular Topps set. This year, for the first time ever, this is not the case. Instead, we just get two players, John Mayberry Jr. and Kyle Kendrick, with photos that are just slightly recropped.
(The Series Two Topps version is on the left and the Topps Phillies Team Set version is on the right. The Kendrick cards are fairly similar in the way Topps cropped the photo only slightly differently between the two cards.)
I’m sorry, but this doesn’t cut it — especially since Topps has a long-established, unbroken record (until now) of including at least a few cards with photos differing from the card in the base set. I found this infuriating, and it undid all the warm, fuzzy feelings that Topps engendered 
with this year’s Archives offering. There are a lot of things that I grudgingly tolerate — Bowman prospect inserts that aren’t really rookie cards, the same photo getting used a half-dozen times across various brands and insert sets, the ridiculous number of parallels, Tier One, & Triple Threads… just to name a few — but I find it downright insulting when Topps decides to leave a huge steaming crap over an established product that takes so little effort to properly manage. The insult becomes even greater when you take a look at Jonathan Papelbon’s card: the Photoshop job on that is just horrible. While acceptable for the Phillies Team Set, Topps had more than sufficient time to get a photo of him in a real Phillies uniform for Series Two. As for Thome, you know that Topps has laying around their offices dozens of photos from his first stint with the Phillies — almost all of them unused since 2005. Creating a Series Two card that differed from the Phillies Team Set card was an easily-accomplished no-brainer. However, Topps just couldn’t be bothered — after all, they had Blank Back parallels they just had to make for selling on eBay.
And, no, the Citizens Bank
Park card that was unique to the Phillies Team Set does nothing to help justify the cost of buying the set. At least with Topps Chrome and Opening Day, Topps has made some minor alteration to the basic appearance to every card. But this isn’t the case with the Phillies Team Set, thus making the set almost entirely superfluous. In fact, I will unequivocally state that thanks to Series Two Topps, the Phillies Team Set is a waste of your money. If you haven’t already bought it, don’t.
Topps is now in the third year of a MLB-supported monopoly, and they haven’t done anything to justify why they should have one. Unfortunately, I know the only way real change is going to happen is if I (and a large enough percentage of collectors similar to myself) quite the habit hobby and write letters to MLB and Topps explaining why. Even then, I doubt it will do that much good — after all, despite the amount of money I spend, I’m not the type of collector they care about. It’s almost as if they want to destroy the lower end of the hobby, just because its too much effort for them to really cater to us.
I sincerely hope that Topps won’t repeat this mistake when issuing its 2013 team set blister packs. Sadly, I have no confidence that will actually happen.
Upon reading about the A.J. Burnett signing yesterday, I searched the database and saw that there haven’t been any multi-team Phillies cards that also picture Burnett. That’s somewhat hard to do in this day and age of player movement — given the length of his career and the some of his achievements. So, his first Phillies card, whenever that comes out, will be the first one in my collection showing him — unlike, say, Roy Halladay, who appeared on a Topps Heritage Now & Then insert with Robin Roberts back in 2004…
If you are building your own 2014 Topps Series One set and have holes that need to be filled, please send me an email containing the numbers you need — I have plenty of duplicates, including parallels and inserts, and would love to complete my Series One set (or other holes in my Phillies collection) via trade rather than having to purchase them off of eBay. I have posted both my want list and what I have available for trade.
14,000 Phillies 