(Welcome to what's annually my favorite week of the year, a week where all the things I like converge within seven glorious days. Maybe we'll get into more of why that is -- and why it's not as great as it once was -- as the week goes on. But for now it's Vacation Time! Oh, and Cardboard Appreciation time, too. This is the 372nd in a series):
One of the benefits of playing the Topps card game over on Bluesky that I mentioned earlier is that I come across cards I never noticed all the time.
Most of these cards are either from the 1960s, 1990s or some part of the early 2000s, i.e., times when I wasn't collecting. In 1994, in particular, I was pulling away from the hobby and bought a handful of Topps packs before deciding I wasn't into it anymore.
I never saw this Kevin Wickander card. But when I saw it in an online image a few weeks ago, I immediately purchased a real one for my collection.
What is it that makes cards like this so appealing?
Well, for starters, I love landscape cards. As someone who has design newspaper sports sections for decades, I know that you can get so much more into a landscape photo than your standard vertical photo. Card collectors have a bias against horizontal cards, but, man, the pictures are sweet and I've dedicated posts to this in the past.
Also, dugout equipment arranged in orderly fashion satisfies a certain corner of my brain. I think this happens with other collectors, too. I don't know why this is -- our desire for order in our collection? A fascination with the equipment in our favorite sport?
But look at that, all those helmets keeping a reflective Wickander company. And beyond that, a series of compartments for an array of equipment, bats and bags. The card itself is a continuation of a Topps card from the previous year that I also love and have showed many times on this blog.
Try getting all that in a vertical card (though there are some great bat rack cards in vertical set ups, paging 1961 Wes Covington).
While I was admiring the 1994 Kevin Wickander card -- not a single one of his other cards are even close to being as interesting as that one, I came across this card:
And this one ...
Oh, brother. Do I need to collect 1994 Topps?
All right, the answer to that is "no". I've never been crazy about the green triangle on every card and there are no other cards like these three in the rest of the set (though plenty of cool shots). If the design was a little more appealing and the cards a little less glossy, I might consider it.
Besides ...
It was kind of a regular thing for Topps in the mid-1990s.
But it's nice to know that even after being in this collecting game for 50 years that there are still cards out there that I have never seen -- and when I spot them, I have to have them.
I still have the love for the game.
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