Team collectors: do you find that trying to complete your team sets is getting more difficult?
I was feeling pretty good about where I was already with the Dodgers I had accumulated from this year's Allen & Ginter product. With 10 cards down and five inserts landed, I figured I was getting pretty close to finishing it off.
Wrong.
This year's A&G set happens to include more Dodgers base cards than in any other previous A&G set. There are 17 of them, so I'm barely halfway there.
You may chalk this up to the Dodgers showing up in the World Series. But the Dodgers are one of the most popular teams in sports so there's always going to be plentiful cards in each Topps set. I just didn't expect to be so far behind when I thought I was way ahead.
I decided to look back on past A&G sets to see how many Dodgers showed up in the base set each year. It turned out it wasn't exactly a straight line going up.
2006: 9
2007: 10
2008: 16
2009: 12
2010: 10
2011: 8
2012: 9
2013: 14
2014: 14
2015: 12
2016: 16
2017: 12
2018: 17
Not a straight line up, but definitely going up. The 2008 set is a bit of an outlier. Throw that one out and Topps is definitely asking us A&G team collectors to find more cards these days.
My thought is that's because there are fewer non-baseball players in Allen & Ginter the last five or so years. But there is another culprit in team collecting getting so much more complicated.
I wanted to see what happened when you threw in the inserts. There's got to be more inserts in A&G per team, right? There's certainly more inserts in everything else.
Here is the year-by-year A&G insert breakdown for the Dodgers:
2006: 1
2007: 1
2008: 1
2009: 2
2010: 3
2011: 3
2012: 5
2013: 5
2014: 7
2015: 6
2016: 8
2017: 6
2018: 6
You don't need a graph to see that line is going up and up, but here you go:
The blue line is the base cards and the red line is the insert cards. The red line is taking a more direct path in the upward direction.
Here is a graph that shows the path of the number of Dodgers base cards each year (blue line) and the number of Dodgers base AND insert cards each year (red line). You can see that the red line is putting some distance between itself and the blue line. MOAR INSERTS! COLLECTORS WANT MOAR INSERTS! Topps sayeth!
I didn't even include some of the impossible-to-get inserts, such as the Skippers mini of Dave Roberts from a couple of years ago. So that red line should be traveling even farther away from the blue line.
The painful element of all this is I know it holds true for many other sets. If you like one of the popular teams there will be more base cards to chase and definitely more inserts to chase than ever before.
It makes me want to buy the entire team set at the beginning and be done. I HATE that I'm thinking like that. If I start doing that, it will mean the eventual end of me collecting modern sets because I won't care. But maybe that's what needs to be done to make Topps answer for this.
As it stands now I'm already ignoring a number of inserts just because there isn't enough time in the day.
But, man, don't make me give up on collecting the team set through buying packs and trading. I've done that since I was a kid.
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