The State of Topps?

[Rich Klein]

Originally Posted by steve B

Production is nowhere near what it was in the early-mid 90's.

Maybe more sets from Topps, but they're not overproduced, and a few of them are very niche products.

I haven't looked at the Donruss stuff this year, but from the photos that are online with the reviews it's just rehashing the 80's designs just like archives and heritage. (I seldom buy those but they are popular)

Panini wasn't that far behind last year, they had nine sets just in baseball. And about that many for basketball football and hockey too.
And somehow they've got Beckett the company pushing "unlicensed stuff is fake and worthless" to give them a glowing review with only a MLBPA license. That's less than wild card had with the NFL when a licensing dispute put them out of Beckett and out of business.

I've bought a few packs, and somehow their stuff just does nothing for me. The inserts are nice, but the rest just seem cheap.

And I don't like that they avidly promote the jersey/bat/whatever cards here but don't make them for any of their other worldwide markets.

I was a fan of a lot of Donruss products, but just can't get excited about them as a Panini brand

Steve B

Seve -- Wild Card is still listed in the Beckett on-line price guide. I searched for 1991 wild card Favre and found this link.

http://www.beckett.com/search/?term=...1&tmm=extended

There were many reasons Wild Card lost their license but all their 91-93 cards are still listed in the On-Line Price Guide. And if Wild Card is no longer in a print Beckett publication, I would wager that is because the product is too thinly traded and/or almost no one cares. Remember there was a proliferation of over produced issues at that time. I was there at Beckett for the Wild Card problems -- and let me tell you, I'd rather we'd have pulled those cards in 1993 from our listings and just left them in our annual guides then.

And as for the MLBPA deisgnation. Since Panini does have that, you can't really say the cards are not licensed. They are not licensed by MLB but the MLBPA designation counts for quite a bit, especially if there are signed cards in the product. Thus why shouldn't Beckett price and review those cards.

When Beckett says unlicensed that refers more towards the Broder type issues of the 1980's or other issues with NO proper licensing.

Beckett may do (and have done) plenty of things wrong over the years but these two cases are not them. Both of these issues you bring up were done correctly by Beckett.

Regards
Rich