Topps Wall Art takes postseason twist with Player of the Game series
By Chris Olds | Beckett Baseball Editor
Topps‘ latest Wall Art series is on that’s focusing on the stars of the postseason — the top players of each game so far.
They’re the focus of the Player of the Game line that arrived online Thursday.
The standard red-framed prints are 10-by-14 and printed on 16-point vintage card stock and are limited to just 25 serial-numbered copies. Those cost $29.99 on Topps.com. Each player also has a blue-framed 1/1 version that costs $99.99.
Players showcased include Kansas City Royals stars Eric Hosmer, James Shields and Mike Moustakas, the Orioles’ Chris Tillman, Nick Markakis and Nelson Cruz, the Giants’ Jake Peavy, Brandon Belt and Ryan Vogelsong, as well as the Cardinals’ Matt Carpenter, John Lackey and Matt Adams. Also included is a card for Nationals star Bryce Harper after his Game 3 heroics in the NLDS and the Dodgers’ Zack Greinke.
In other releases Thursday, the company also revealed its Gold Edition of prints for players in 2014 Topps Series 1. Those prints are limited to just one copy per player and are $99.99. Click here to see who’s still available.
Chris Olds is the editor of Beckett Baseball and Beckett Sports Card Monthly magazines. Have a comment, question or idea? Send an email to him at colds@beckett.com. Follow him on Twitter by clicking here.
The more Topps floods the market with these non-stop releases, the less interesting they become. If it were only a few releases a year, people might chase them. With something new every week, they start to lose all value as collectibles. I guess that’s fine, if you want to pay that much money for essentially a cardboard poster to hang on your wall, but try to sell them down the road and you’ll find no one’s interested.
Paul: They’re clearly not for you. However, they wouldn’t be bothering to make them if people weren’t buying them. Secondly, not everyone buys everything with the pure intent to sell it. And it’s the collecting interest that will prompt value as a collectable.
Chris: I’ve actually bought some of Topps’ past “wall art” issues – and not as an investment, but as a collector who wants to keep them. But my wallet only goes so far, and once it became clear there would be no way I could keep up with all the releases Topps keeps pumping out every week I lost all interest in any of them. I can also attest, having bought some, that the quality is simply not worth $30 a card. And there are few people who will plunk down $100 on a newly-printed 1/1 piece of cardboard unless they think they can get their money back some day. And just because Topps keeps printing them, doesn’t mean people are buying. Several days after release, there are still many copies of the #/25 player of the game cards available, and there are many, many of the 1/1 gold edition series 1 cards still available.
I’m not saying these sets are a bad idea, just that Topps is cranking out way too many of them and that’s killing the “collector interest” to which you refer. If there were fewer releases, more collectors might see them as something special.