I picked up a few more packs of 2015 Topps baseball cards today – I didn’t want to let the coupon from my Target “value box” go to waste. Since I think everybody’s either well on their way to collecting whatever part of the set appeals to them (or doesn’t care about it at all), I’ll stick to the highlights.
I found two more Mets for my team set (only eight more to go, and I think a few of those are in the mail to me.)
It took a little longer for this year’s baseball cards to reach retailers near me, but I finally found them today and splurged to by a “value box” of 2015 Topps Series 1 from Target.
I really like this year’s design. The colorful borders help the 2015 cards to stand out from Topps’ recent efforts, and really, they don’t look much like anything else in the company’s 60+ years of flagship sets. The card fronts are mercifully foil free except for the Topps logo in most cases, and the backs have large, easy-to-read card numbers.
Or maybe I’m just happy that I found some Mets in my 10 packs of cards. Daniel Murphy was the top card on the first regular pack of 2015 baseball cards I opened. (He could have been my first card of the year, except I wanted to see what was in the bonus pack before I got started.)
And the Mets kept coming.
Topps released the official checklist for the first series of its 2015 baseball card set today, and I’m pretty excited about it.
With an official release date of Feb. 4th through hobby channels, scattered cards will probably start to turn up soon since individual Target and WalMart stores never seem to be all that concerned about keeping to day-and-date. (Mine, unfortunately, are more likely to put out the cards late than early.)
We’ve got a 700-card base set to look forward to in 2015, split into two series of 350 – and it does look like that will help us get cards of some middle relievers and bench players who might have been skipped in recent years. (How you feel about this is going to depend very much on your reaction to the news that Carlos Torres is getting his first baseball card since 2006 – if you said “who’s Carlos Torres?,” you probably would have preferred fewer cards to collect. I’m happy and wouldn’t mind going back to the 792-card sets that were the norm in the late 1980s, when there were only 26 teams and they employed a 24-man roster.)
By my count, there are 16 Mets players in the base set, and 14 of them are still Mets as I write this (though Dillon Gee‘s days in New York definitely seem to be numbered.) Daisuke Matsuzaka will be pitching for the Fukuoka Softbank Hawks this season, and Eric Young Jr. is still looking for a job.
To make up for that, we’re getting the first Mets baseball cards of the aforementioned Torres (and it only took 106 appearances over two seasons, not bad for a 26-year-old middle reliever who’s not exactly a household name) and rookie Dilson Herrera. Most of the Mets’ stars appear in Series 1, with Matt Harvey and winter acquisition Michael Cuddyer the biggest names who are waiting for Series 2.
Continue reading “A Mets fan’s first impressions of the 2015 Topps Series 1 checklist”
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