Return of the BLOG BAT-AROUND!!!!



Stale Gum has issued a call to fingers, time to type out our thoughts on the chosen topic at hand.



Just like in High School, apologies to Clay Matthews, one topic to rule them all...



Surprise! It's about Topps 2011!!


Michael Eisner has just fired the entire Topps Product Development staff and chose to hire you to take their place. Mr. Eisner has given you carte blanche to do whatever you want with Topps Baseball -- as long as you keep it under $2/pack.

If you were in charge of Topps, and based upon what you've seen of 2011 Topps Baseball Series One, what (if anything) would you have done differently.

This one is real easy for certain bloggers...BRING BACK TOPPS TOTAL!!

But I'm not gonna take that route, exactly...

The first thing that I want to do, is bring back one series of 792 cards. That's it. This is the flagship, it doesn't need all the bells and whistles, people will buy it. They will buy it all year long. The set doesn't need multiple series, it doesn't need thirteen cards of the most popular players. How are the other players going to be popular if, outside of the sticker autos and relics, you don't get their cards? We're gonna make Heritage and Ginter and half a dozen other "high-end" sets throughout the year. The Topps flagship set should be a yearbook of the 600 best players, the managers, team checklists/stats cards, and maybe a set of the best photos taken by Topps photographers throughout last season. Leave rookies who come in this year for the Traded set.

Parallels are awesome, I am an absolute sucker for serial numbered cards, also. They can stay.

Inserts, inserts, inserts. They drum up a lot of sales. They take away from the value of the base cards, and they are the same players over and over. They are essentially short-prints that set collectors don't have to collect to have the "set". Instead of a "giveaway" of cards that can already be found, use the transmogrifier to award different inserts and roll this into the eTopps marketplace. You get one code per pack. We would ship by volume, not per card and entirely at cost. This would also allow you to sell your unwanted inserts to pay for the shipping costs or you could use that money to buy from the Topps Store.

This would also not limit inserts to a print deadline. We could roll out a player of the week, rookie of the week, season highlights at the spur of the moment.

OK, those are my thoughts, can't wait to read all of the other bat-arounds!