Bring back the fun

If you grew up in the 1970s, you know this card. You probably own it. If you were born later, you've at least heard of it. If you've ever read Ben Henry's retired Baseball Card Blog, you've come across Kurt Bevacqua's crowning achievement a time or two.

This is card No. 564 of the 660-card 1976 Topps set, and it is the introduction to my third blog bat around post, in which I have been asked to address what I liked/disliked about the 2008 card offerings and what I'd like to see in 2009.

You may be asking yourself, what does this 33-year-old card have to do with what's going on today? And I'll answer your question with another question (which everybody hates, by the way) and say, "if this card came out today, what do you think the card companies would do with it?"

And I'll answer my own question for you (which people also hate). At the very least, the card would be a short-print. More likely it would be an insert. Or they would turn it into a gimmick by printing a "rare" card of some 2-year-old bubble-gum blowing prodigy, who is actually a card company employee's son who had his sippy cup photoshopped out of his mouth and replaced with a ginormous bubble that had just enveloped the Golden Gate Bridge.

You know it would happen.

And this is what I dislike about what's going on in the hobby today. Card companies are tinkering with the fun in card collecting. If they're not turning fun into something seedy with fake no-hitters and beauty queens, they're at the very least regulating it.

Our fun is being rationed. They're forcing us to rummage for scraps. They'll issue an afterthought of a base set, and then they'll throw you an insert every three packs and a jersey card every 20 and an autograph every 40. In the meantime, enjoy our base cards, with no-effort design, shoddy photography, and 14 different versions of Eric Chavez.

I'll be the first to say I don't need inserts. I don't need parallels, jersey cards, autographs, none of it. I don't need them, that is, if the base set is something that is fun. But Upper Deck Artifacts is not fun. UD Spectrum (I just drew a major blank on the name of the product) is not fun. X is not fun. Topps base set? I waved goodbye to the last bit of fun in that set last May.

The card companies put out too many products that are joyless. This hobby should be all about joy! It's baseball! The greatest game on earth! Make a product that shows you actually enjoy what you're depicting!

My favorite sets are the sets in which every card is interesting. You don't even need inserts in sets like that, because the base cards are so great. The problem is, that even with the few fun sets that are produced today, card companies find a way to muck it up.

There are three recent sets that I would call fun sets. One doesn't even exist anymore, and I'll show that last.

The first you know very well. It's Allen & Ginter.

A lot of thought goes into this set. It's well-done, it's artistic, it's clever, it's whimsical. It's almost everything I want in a set. It is a credit to the creators that they can include cards of monster trucks and rugby -- events I'd only attend if you could see my lobotomy scars -- and I don't even mind. That means they must've made some other cards that I like a heck of a lot.

This set can stand alone without a single insert as far as I'm concerned. The relics and minis are just a bonus.

The thing that doesn't make it perfect are the short-prints. Short-prints are not fun, card companies. They're WORK. You're taking the thrill of the chase and distorting it, transforming it into a death march to completion. Stop the BS. (Same goes for Heritage, another fun set tarnished even more by short-prints).

Here is fun set No. 2. Upper Deck Timeline. This set really snuck up on me, and some of you probably still don't like it much. But it really grew on me, and I might've been suckered into collecting more of it if I knew how fun it was going to be from the start.

The base cards are nice, and the variety of different kinds of cards is interesting. Plus UD adds the nostalgia angle by trotting out some of their old designs. It makes every card you pull intriguing and, here's that word again, FUN. I wasn't collecting when half these designs first came out, so again, that's saying something if I'm enjoying pulling these cards.

But this is what's not fun about it: the difficulty in pulling certain cards (I'm not sure if it's traditional short-printing or if it's just that the large variety of cards prevent you from tracking everything down). And the quality control issues -- roller marks, miscuts, dinged corners -- need to improve if Timeline is going to have any kind of staying power.

Timeline reminds me of a set I like a lot that is no longer with us.

Topps Fan Favorites was produced between 2003 and 2005. It is the set that got me back into collecting current cards, because it was a present-day product, but featured, for the most part, past stars. I loved seeing the players in new poses on old designs. I would pull out my 1981 Topps Jim Rice, for example, and compare it to the Fan Favorites card.

Every card was interesting, and just as important, every card was equally available. No short prints. There were some autograph and glossy inserts, but for the most part it was all about the base. But it was well-done base. It was well thought-out, for the most part (some photos didn't accurately reflect the time period of the card -- Randy Jones, for example, is featured on a 1975 Topps card wearing the familiar Padres brown-and-gold uniform that didn't come into being until the late 1970s). It was a fun product, that didn't dismiss its audience.

All three of these sets seem to value the collector, for the most part, and there are too few of them.

I could go on about other things I'd like to see. Yes, I'd love it if Topps Total came back, but I'm sure others will write about that (I think a couple of people already have). For now, I would simply be happy if the card companies would stop regulating our fun. Create sets in which every card is a great pull, so we're not grasping and clawing for too few inserts, searching for a few morsels of fun. I really don't think that's too much to ask.

Don't burst my fun bubble, Topps and UD. Because I'll go back to Kurt Bevacqua and that 1976 set real quick. It'll be all vintage all the time. And you'll never see me again.