Night Owl Cards

  I've been tired of the emphasis on the rookie card in Topps products for years. I don't know how many posts I've devoted to rookie-overkill, but it's certainly a running theme and I'm sure it's boring some readers to tears.   I do know that Topps, and the hobby, has been about rookies, and young players in general, for a long, long time. I'm thinking of the Sporting News Rookie Stars subset in 1959 Topps and similar themes that came after, followed by the multi-player rookie card themes throughout the 1960s, '70s and early '80s.   Then there are the rookie trophies and rookie cups, the All-Topps teams. Those have been around for quite awhile, since 1960!   But obviously the focus is on those youngsters even more these days and you could point to various moments all the way to the present in which Topps (or other card companies) ramped up that focus, through special subsets, inserts, autograph cards, short-prints, etc.   Today I'm pointing at 19...

Cards ceased to exist as I knew them in 1989. Actually, it probably happened in 1985 when Topps issued the U.S. Olympic team set. But that was a subset, which was grouped together and featured a design that differed from the base cards. In 1989, Topps presented 10 cards of players -- who knows WHO they were -- in their college or (lordy, what is this? ) their high school uniforms. And Topps didn't have the courtesy to group them together as their own subset or create a whole new design for them. No, they dispersed them into the base set as if they were regular major league players. Topps noted a difference only with a "draft pick" logo in the corner. Also by selecting 10 players, Topps didn't even have the forethought to consider the legions of collectors who used nine-pocket pages for their collection. So, even if they wanted to separate the NON-major leaguers from the other cards in the set, they couldn't. It would look like this: No place for Robin ...