Every Topps card, diamond giveaway style

(Note: As of at least June of 2012, the links below now go to the Golden Giveway, making all my work pointless. Topps -- you suck).

More than a year ago, when Topps' Million Card Giveaway was at a fever pitch, Wrigley Wax figured out a cool way for collectors to get on the site and search for every Topps card from 1952 through 2009. 

I used that post obsessively when researching my own post topics.

But a few weeks ago, something happened. The links that Wrigley Wax provided for each of the Topps years stopped working. If you click on the year, it takes you to the old Million Card Giveaway site, but the page is pretty much blank. At the top, there is the random name of a baseball superstar.

I suppose that makes sense. Topps has moved on to the Diamond Giveaway extravaganza, with a whole new site that is much like the Million Card site, except with a diamond ring theme.

But I wondered if Topps had continued to store images of all of its cards on the Diamond Giveaway site as it had on the Million Card site. The set-up seemed the same, so it appeared logical that Topps would have its entire catalog of cards in Diamond Giveaway form, too.

So I tried the old URL addresses that Wrigley Wax had provided, simply substituting the Diamond Giveaway address instead.

The address is: http://diamond.toppscards.com

Then you add: /BaseballCard.aspx?CardID= just as you did on the old Million Card site.

The final number added after the equal sign specifies which card is called up.

So, if you type in: http://diamond.toppscards.com/BaseballCard.aspx?CardID=4739

You end up with this:

That is the first card in the 1962 Topps set. Adding one to the CardID will get you the next card in the set and so on and so on.

So, here are the links to the start of each Topps set on the Diamond Giveaway site:

1952
1953

1954

1955

1956

1957

1958 - image of Card #1 is not shown

1959

1960

1961

1962

1963

1964

1965

1966

1967

1968

1969

1970

1971

1972

1973

1974

1975

1976

1977

1978

1979

1980

1981

1982

1983

1984

1985

1986

1987

1988

1989

1990

1991

1992

1993

1994

1995

1996

1997

1998

1999

2000

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

2007

2008

2009

Unfortunately, the 2010 set doesn't appear to be archived on the site, which kind of shows you what Topps thinks of this as an archiving site. Once you get beyond 2009, you start to get into cards like this, which appear to be prizes that can be redeemed through the Diamond Giveaway site. But there are no images from the 2010 set.

Now, using the above links is kind of cumbersome and involves a bunch of guessing to get to the card you want.

Wrigley Wax came up with another way so that you could type in a particular card number in the Million Card address and arrive at the exact card you wanted to view. That's much easier.

It's possible that you can jigger the Diamond Giveaway address in a similar fashion and get the same results. I don't have time to monkey with that now, though. If someone doesn't get to it first, I'll experiment when I have time and add it here.

But, of course, you can always go to the toppsarchives.com site for a simpler way of maneuvering through images of all the cards. I've used that for awhile now. I like it a lot and it's much less time-consuming than the above fashion, although I preferred the Million Giveaway site for the use of scans.

Despite the greatness of that site, there's something more comforting about having Topps itself provide an image archive of all of its cards. Why go to a bunch of collectors' sites when you can go directly to the source that actually created the cards?

Unfortunately, Topps doesn't seem to care about things like that as much as collectors do. So, we'll continue to tinker with URLs and links, and create our own websites, and scan our own cards.

Everyone knows this, but it needs to be said again: Topps is in this for business and collectors are in it for love. (Most collectors anyway).