Sorting through, part 1

 

I don't know about you other bloggers but sometimes I have big plans for this blog, but the plans are too big and halfway in the middle of prepping, I look at the clock and I have to pivot to Plan B or Plan C.

I don't mean to say that anything in Plan B or Plan C is second-best, it's just not what I had planned for today. 

I had planned the next installment of the 1975 Topps Worst-To-Best Countdown, it's well overdue, but it's not ready yet. (I guess this is why people schedule posts in advance, but I can't get myself to do that).

 

So I'll show off what appeared in an absolutely giant box of cards that Johnny's Trading Spot sent me probably a couple of weeks ago now. I've been sorting through it ever since and I'm still not done with the baseball part.

I am finished with the non-baseball stuff, so let's go with that in Part 1.

John very nicely sent me a full set of 2021 Topps Chrome Tennis. I have mentioned a time or two that I'm interested in the set, and I had actually started sniffing around at box prices and such when the whole thing showed up at my door.

It's not a large set, only 100 cards. It's very shiny, obviously, and since the backgrounds are empty, it displays all kinds of finger prints and dust and everything. Photographing this was a nightmare. I almost had to go to Plan D (no, I don't know what that would be).

The set is a random cross-section of men's and women's pro players through history. There are current players and black & white images of notables from decades ago. I like tennis and I follow it casually so I was happy with a lot of the checklist, but I admittedly don't know a lot of the players here. That's probably just my ignorance, but it'll motivate me to find out who some of them are.

It's also got a lot of stars, which made me curious about what notables are missing. There are a lot. Here are some of those missing for the men:

Roger Federer, Novak Djokovic, Rafael Nadal, Bjorn Borg, Andre Agassi, John McEnroe, Jimmy Connors, Ivan Lendl, Boris Becker, Arthur Ashe, Lleyton Hewitt, Mats Wilander

And for the women:

Steffi Graf, Serena Williams, Venus Williams, Monica Seles, Justine Henin, Althea Gibson, Lindsay Davenport, Arantxa Sanchez Vicario, Kim Clijsters, Jennifer Capriati, Maria Sharapova, Gabriela Sabatini

I'm sure the reason for a lot of those missing is "licensing." Topps hasn't done anything with tennis in I don't know how long (maybe never?), so I guess to get who they got is decent.

Here are some of the notable men in the set:

Here are some of the notable women:

I think Topps did better with the women's checklist than the men's. Some favorites included here.

Although the cards are pretty spare, I like the look. I'm still a sucker for chrome in certain cases and it certainly classes up this set. Tennis gets ignored in the U.S. but I'll watch tennis on TV before I watch any other sport that's not baseball or the NFL. The one-on-one nature of the sport intrigues me and it helps that I played just a little in my younger days.

The box included a smattering of the inserts, which look very nice. If I didn't have so many baseball interests I would try to chase some of these.

John also sent a decent amount of refractors from the set, because of course chrome needs its parallels.

I like completing a set without any effort once in awhile and since it's pretty small, I already have a binder ready to store it. I'd like to say it'd be nice if there were tennis sets in the future, but I probably shouldn't be adding anything else to collect.

Speaking of which ...

John also sent a bunch of 1970s Wacky Packages! Most of these are from around Series 10 or so. That's after I stopped collecting them as a kid, but they're still from the mid-1970s, so they have that appeal that us kids liked so much at the time.

Several more. I kind of mixed up the order of these when I was getting this post ready (quickly). It'll take a little bit to put them back in order -- it's not like they wrote which series it was on the back.

John even snuck in one of those Lost Wackys, which I find fascinating. He wrote about these underground stickers on his blog a couple years ago. It made me want to grab a few, but they're a lot of money, so never mind.

That does it for the non-baseball portion of the box. I'm sure that Part 2 -- all the baseball cards -- will be more-read than this post, as this is night owl-core right here.

But I think the '75 countdown post will be coming up next before I get to that. I just hate having half-finished posts sitting there undone.