When Topps is Bottom

One of the unpleasant things about getting older is the longer you live, the more your childhood slips away from you.  It can be that you discover life is not as idyllic as you imagined it would be or the death of someone who played an integral role in your life growing up.  But most often it is little things that you cherished as a child that slip away from you.  Sometimes you watch a show or movie that you absolutely loved as a child but when you watch it as an adult, it doesn't quite measure up to your fond memory.  Or it can be your favorite athlete finally retiring leaving you to watch a game you love without your childhood hero.  Today I experienced one of these smaller things and it has bothered all day.

I have spent the better part of the past 30 years collecting baseball cards.  I can still remember getting baseball cards in the checkout lines of the local hardware and grocery stores, and the best part was the packs only cost a quarter.  I was never fortunate enough to get a high value card (partially because the 1980s nearly ruined collecting with mega mass production) but when I was a kid, I collected them for pure joy.  I would read the backs of the cards day after day, memorizing useless stats and facts about even the most mediocre players.  Anytime I would get new cards, I would painstakingly separate them into teams and store them in old lunchboxes and shoeboxes. 

I collected practically any brand of card I could get my hands on but my favorite brand has always been Topps.  They were so appealing to me as a kid because they were cheaper than Donruss or Fleer and much less expensive than Upper Deck when they burst onto the scene in 1989.  My favorite design of all time is the wood border of the 1987 Topps set.  I still think this design is by far the most unique design for a base set ever. 

As I got older, collecting became less regular but when I decided to buy I always went at it with such a fervor that I would nearly become obsessed with it; mainly because I was finally gainfully employed and could buy in quantities that I once only dreamed about.  A few years ago I was even able to do something I once thought was impossible: I bought a case of cards.  Twenty-four boxes, thirty-six packs per box, ten cards per pack.  It was heaven on earth.  (I sold some of the boxes and several of the cards and was able to recoup a large percentage of the cost of the purchase). 

But baseball collecting forever changed in summer or 2009 when Major League Baseball announced an exclusive deal for Topps to be the only MLB licensed brand on the market.  Upper Deck tried to battle the deal but to no avail.  Topps had cornered the baseball card market.  I was apprehensive about the deal but each manufacturer had so many products available that the average consumer would not even notice they were all made by the same company.  Topps had their base set that was released in three different series, their Bowman line, and their Allen and Ginter throwback cards just to name a few.  The quality of cards Topps was producing and the cool inserts that included legendary players were extremely appealing.  I thought Topps being the only baseball card producer might just work.  After all, they had always been my favorite.

Now in the fourth year of the exclusive deal with MLB, Topps has finally found away to ruin card collecting for me.  I am not one to usually protest, but I feel like Topps has stepped across a line that I will not support.  Their egregious decision is nothing life altering but it can be attributed to political correctness run amok and I just can't stand for it.  By now, I am sure you are asking yourself what Topps could have possibly done to upset a lifelong collector?  For some, hearing the answer may still leave you perplexed but for those who really know me, they will understand.  The egregious decision that Topps has made is to rewrite the MLB history books.  On the back of the 2013 set just released a few weeks ago, they have included a gimmick called Career Chase that tells how close the player on the card is to reaching an all-time record.  Some examples are as follows: With 260 home runs, (Prince) Fielder is 502 away from Barry Bonds' all-time record of 762; With 191 RBI, (Buster) Posey is 2,036 away from Hank Aaron's all-time record of 2,277; and With 149 runs, (Mike) Trout is 2,146 away from Rickey Henderson's all-time record of 2,297.

Ordinarily, I would think this feature would be fantastic.  It allows a collector of fan to see where the player on the card stands against some of the greats to ever play the game.  But Topps took things too far when it came to mentioning the number of hits a player has and comparing it to the career hits leader.  Here is an example of what I am talking about: With 3,304 hits, (Derek) Jeter is 952 away from the all-time record of 4,256.  There is no mention of who holds the record; a record probably to never be broken in our lifetime.  Of course, anyone with any baseball knowledge knows that the current hits record belongs to one of the most controversial players to ever suit up, Pete Rose, but to not mention him on the back of the card like his career never happened is preposterous and cheapens what Topps is trying to do.

(For those of you who are casual fans at best and may not know, Pete Rose has been banned from the game of baseball since 1989 for betting on games.  The evidence at the time was circumstantial but enough to ban the Hit King and years later Pete finally confessed his sins.  It has now been nearly a quarter of a century and Pete has never gotten a sniff of being reinstated.  The greatest pure hitter to ever play the game, a man who embodied his nickname "Charlie Hustle", is not in the Hall of Fame and will not be any time in the foreseeable future.)

But this is not about Pete Rose still being ostracized for a sin that he has already paid a severe price for. This is about the audacity of the executives at Topps to make the holier-than-thou decision to exclude any mention of Pete Rose from their baseball cards.  Who gave these guys permission to rewrite the history books?  And if the execs are holding players to certain standards, then why is Barry Bonds mentioned on the Career Chase for homeruns?  I know Barry never failed a drug test, mainly because baseball was making tons of money at time when they needed it more than ever off roid-ragers and turned a blind eye to what was going on, but anyone who watched the man play or has read Game of Shadows can tell you that circumstantial evidence on Barry is just as damning as what MLB had on Pete.

If it were my call, however, I would not exclude Bonds name from the card because it is asinine to pretend that a player's career never happened.  Yet, I have another question for the sanctimonious yahoos in charge.  I can concede that nothing was proven of Bonds but how about Alex Rodriguez?  He is an admitted steroid user and has once again been linked to a PED mill in Miami.  If the decision makers at Topps are the morality police, then why does A-Rod have several different cards in each of their sets?  And what about the freshly minted Lance Armstrong of baseball, Ryan Braun?  How many times does he have to deny, deny, deny before Topps holds him accountable?

Whether you love or hate any of these players is irrelevant.  But to pretend that someone's career, especially a player that played at such a level to set a near unbreakable record, it's just ludicrous to say the least.  Clay Luraschi, a Topps spokesman, characterized it as a "simple decision" but would not elaborate on what was so simple.  I agree that it was a simple (minded) decision.  To ignore history is never a good idea.  Would we do justice to the Holocaust if we ignored Adolf Hitler's role?  Would we do justice to the civil rights movement if we ignored slavery?  Now, I am in no way comparing the stats on a baseball card to the loss of lives and atrocities suffered during the Holocaust and slavery.  I am merely making the point that when we try to change history years after the fact, we put ourselves on a slippery slope that once you start down, who's to say where it will end.

For the record, I am a big fan of the way that Pete Rose played the game.  I remember watching him get hit  number 4,192 on September 11, 1985 to break Ty Cobb's 57 year-old record.  (Ty Cobb was a unapologetic racist and generally regarded as one of the dirtiest players ever, yet Topps doesn't shy away from putting him on cards).  I saw him a play in person a few times when he was in the twilight of his career while also doubling as the manager of his beloved Cincinnati Reds.  I admit what Pete did was wrong and deserved punishment.  But he has served his punishment.  It's time to move on.

So that is what I am doing.  Topps, I am moving on from you.  Unlike Topps decision to rewrite history, my decision was not so simple.  With the current stranglehold Topps has on the card market, this appears to be the death knell for my card collecting hobby.  I know I am not the only one who feels this way.  But also unlike Topps, I will not omit my history of collecting their cards.  For me to do so would be robbing myself of  part of my childhood.  For Topps to omit Pete Rose from the hits record is to rob loyal fans of the integrity of historical accuracy.  How can we ever move forward in society if we aren't willing to address facts?  After all, if we aren't willing to discuss and recognize history, aren't we doomed to repeat it?

Signed, Sealed, and Delivered

Today is one of my favorite sports days of the year.  Sure, it doesn’t rival opening day of the MLB season, the opening rounds of March Madness, or the Super Bowl but for a day in early February, it’s something for college football fans to get excited about.  Of course, I am talking about National Signing Day!  Today is the day in which thousands of young men all across the country sign to play college football and in so doing give each fan a glimpse of what their favorite program will look like this coming fall.

For years, there hasn’t been much to get excited about on this day if you were a University of Kentucky football fan.  I am one of the few who I know that would pay attention to the Wildcat signees and try to learn more about them and how they could help the program.  Overall, there wasn’t much interest from casual fans.  They would latch onto the biggest names in the crop of talent and then expect them to dominate the SEC as soon as they stepped foot on campus.  Or they would bemoan the fact that UK was either 11^th or 12^th in the SEC in recruiting and go on a negative tirade about it being a loser program and why couldn’t the football team be more like the basketball team.  Well, it’s just not that easy.

But this year brings an excitement to National Signing Day that I have never seen before.  New UK head coach Mark Stoops has the fan base excited.  He has been able to do things that many have assumed were impossible at Kentucky: he has been able to sell a lackluster program to highly ranked kids and get them to come to what many consider to be the worst football program in the SEC.  He steadily preached about a change of culture and the university has stepped up to give him unprecedented support.  And for the first time in my memory, here we are in the middle of February and there is more talk about UK football than there is about the basketball program.  (Some of that speaks to the fickleness of fans.  The basketball program is 16-6, 7-2 in SEC, and many have given them up for dead.)

Just last week, the UK football team released a You Tube video promoting signing day.  During the Super Bowl, UK football ran an ad on Lexington station WKYT showing clips of past UK greats in action and featured a voiceover of former UK receiver and new offensive coordinator, Neal Brown, saying, “Come be a hero.”  The energy was pulsating across Big Blue Nation.

And now, on National Signing Day, no one could have anticipated the kind of first signing class that Stoops was able to haul in.  Eight of the kids signed were considered 4-star players by one of the major recruiting services (Scout, Rivals, ESPN).  Three of those were ranked in the top 250 of this signing class in the nation.  To put that in perspective, they had only signed one of those kids in the top 250 of a class in the past five years.  Two of these kids were Kentucky kids who had not been likely to attend UK until Stoops and his staff came on board.  Ryan Timmons, a projected wide receiver and return specialist from Franklin Co. High School, chose Kentucky over Ohio State and Florida (where he was being recruited by Joker Phillips) and Jason Hatcher, a former USC commit from Trinity High School in Louisville, will have the opportunity to leave their mark, along the lines of Tim Couch, Andre Woodson, Craig Yeast, and Jared Lorenzen, as kids who stayed in-state and became legends at UK the past fifteen years. 

Many of these kids are going to have the opportunity to play immediately at Kentucky, which certainly has to be one of the key selling points to young recruits, but any turnaround will not come overnight.  The one thing that I see from these young men that I like is that they already seem close and they already seem to have defined leadership.  Jaleel Hytche, the young cornerback prospect out of Ohio, was one of Stoops first commitments and has waved the banner proudly for UK.  He has been aggressively talking to other prospects on Twitter encouraging them to come be a part of something special.  For the first time I can remember there has been a campaign set in motion that it may not be so bad to play at Kentucky and these recruits truly seem to believe that.  They seem to understand exactly what it is going to take to be successful at UK and are helping convince others along the way.

As excited as I am about this class, I must urge caution to Big Blue Nation.  If there is to be a turnaround for UK football, it will take these kind of classes year in and year out.  Remember, most of the same fans who are getting excited about Fall 2013 are the ones who abandoned the Cats in Fall 2012.  I admit that I am as excited as anybody about the future of the program but that excitement should be tempered with patience.  I hope that Coach Stoops will get the one thing from fans that Coach Phillips never received: unconditional support.  Check your negativity at the door; there’s no place for that if this program is to move forward.  That’s all I am asking of anyone. 

But for today, let’s just enjoy the prospects that have signed and talk them all up like they are All-Americans.  The Stoops staff has done a magnificent job of going in and getting guys from hotbeds that had previously been untapped by UK.  Stoops said when he was hired that he would concentrate on the states of Kentucky, Ohio, and Florida.  As it stands right now, he has three top players each from Kentucky and Ohio and nine from the state of Florida.  He has flipped kids from nationally prominent schools like Nebraska and USC convinced them to come to a lower tier SEC school.  Just think, if he can do that in just over two months of recruiting, what is the class of 2014 going to look like when he has a full year to get after it?