Twelve years ago I wrote a post about the return of the Topps Future Star(s) label and my lack of appreciation for it when Topps first broke it out in the late 1980s (although it also used "Future Stars" to describe its three-player prospect cards at the start of the decade). Since first returning in 2014 -- actually its second return as the Future Stars went on hiatus for 1992 and 1993 before coming back in 1994 -- the Future Star has continued strong for every Topps flagship set except for one. It's so much a standard part of the base set now that I don't think anyone even notices it anymore, at least certainly not like collectors did in the late 1980s. There's a reason for that, I think, outside of showing up every year. I went through the last 12 years and broke down the Future Stars for each. The idea for this post began as a dissection of the Future Star(s) logo, but I found totaling Future Stars for each year more interesting. Let's start with ...
When you get to be my age time travels faster than ever. I think I've finally figured out that the reason older people talk about this so often is not to make idle chit-chat but because it's so staggering that you can't help but talk about it. It's shocking. I know almost a day doesn't pass without me thinking about how fast the days, months, years move. I suppose this topic is especially appropriate today as we just moved the clocks ahead an hour last night. It's annually one of my least favorite days of the year and I'm writing this in a half-stupor thanks to that time change. It's about the last thing I want to do at 60 years old -- speed things up. And here we are charging ever faster toward the start of the Major League Baseball season, which according to my research is starting earlier than at any point since I became a baseball fan. This is discounting the recent super-early, one-off games or series in a foreign country that MLB likes to d...