Set Appreciation Post #17 - Topps Lineage

Topps Lineage is really an off-brand version of Topps Archives.

Yes, there are positives here, but I think there are limitations because of its format.  

Same general idea as far as the checklist goes, but rather than recycling a bunch of their former card designs, Topps used the same border for all the cards. Looks like something that was likely a rejected design for one of their base sets at some point.  

Here is the basic design.  

I like the photograph of Koufax, but there is just nothing really special or interesting about the design of this card. It's just not very good.  

Back of the card.  

No stats on the back. I actually like this idea for this type of set, especially given the way that Topps wrote these snippets. If you had to summarize the career of Sandy Koufax in two sentences, it would be difficult to do a better job than what is on the back of this card. The modern players are just as well done. 

The card backs are a positive for this set.  

Similar to the Koufax card, there are plenty of other older players throughout the set. 

Whoever made the set actually did a good job of picking out former players. Nice mix from all different areas. The older players, such as Tris Speaker, are generally colorized, but the card photos still look decent. The photography on the older players is another positive in Topps Lineage.  

I like that Lenny Harris makes an appearance on the Ryne Sandberg card. He's a first ballot guy if someone ever makes a Hall of Fame for utility and bench players. Also shout out to Topps for not using the cringeworthy Milwaukee Braves logo from the 1950s and 1960s, even if they used the cringeworthy Cleveland Indians logo on the modern players.  

Any set that has a subset of cards with Topps All-Star Rookie Trophies can't be all that bad, right?  

Favorite Cardinals card.  

Bob Gibson.  

Favorite former Durham Bulls card.  

Evan Longoria.  

Best non-Cardinal/non-Durham Bulls card.  

An aquward looking, 21 year-old Freddie Freeman.  

How many Braves players have baseball cards with this same pose at the Braves Spring Training Stadium?  

It's a lot.  

Topps Lineage is still not all sunshine, lollipops, and rainbows.  

There is still the ever-present horrible airbrushing. I picked out two different examples. The Adrian Beltre card is just incredibly bad. The Damon card is not quite as bad, but they airbrushed him out of a Tigers uniform, but left Jim Leyland in the background.  

If Jim Leyland were smoking in the background, I would forgive the bad airbrushing.  

Topps used the parallels from their flagship sets on the Lineage cards. A bunch of sparkles and colors that do not look very good with this card design.  

Sparkly Lou Gehrig?  

No.  

However, I do like the cloth cards based on the old Cloth Stickers. Topps had some cloth/silk parallels around in different products around this time. Good looking cards that they should consider bringing back.  

I have thought about finding all of the Cardinals and former Durham Bulls cloth sticker cards from this set, but that is somewhere way down on the list of things to do. 

Let's talk about another positive.  

The inserts are great, but similar to the Archives sets, the designs are all borrowed from older Topps products.  

There are the 2011 Rookies insert that is a copy of the 1980s Rack Pack All-Star cards.  

Hank Conger with a Hooters ad over his shoulder.  

There are 1975 Topps Minis. Miniature in real life, but not here because of the scan.  

There are also relic cards with the 1975 Topps Mini design. I am sure that there are a few floating around in one of my boxes of relics, but I am not going to go surfing for one at the moment.  

We also have the 1964 Topps Stand-Ups.  

Love the green and yellow backgrounds on these cards.  

There are also autographs. There were some decent current player autographs in this set. Early autographs of Stanton, Posey, and Freeman. I bought a box of Lineage while I was on vacation in St. Louis back in the day and ended up with a Charlie Morton autograph.  

Charlie is pretty old now, but he's had some good seasons along the way.  Solid autograph. 

The autographs of the older players are really nice. I have a few of the players who appeared for the Cardinals. I will go with Duke point guard, Dick Groat for this post.  

The 1952 Topps design has been completely overused at this point, but what are you going to do?  

HOW DOES IT COMPARE?

 Lineage is essentially a Topps Archives set. I like that they do not recycle former flagship set designs on the base cards. I think that is the biggest positive here, along with some of the autographs. There is nothing here that really stands out to me, so I am going to go with the bottom half of my rankings.

In my opinion, it is not as good as the first four sets in the bottom half of my Set Appreciation posts. So, that's below the Heritage Minors, Emotion XL, Donruss, and Bowman. I thought long and hard about how this set compares to the Ionix and Bowman Platinum set. I was tempted to put it behind both of those sets, but I think the autographs are the saving grace here. 

Yes, copying the design of the 1952 Topps set is slightly annoying, but they are good looking cards. I am ranking the Topps Lineage set 11th.  

16. 2000 Pacific Paramount Update 

15. 2010 Topps USA Baseball  

14. 2000 Topps 

13. Bowman Platinum 

12. 2000 UD Ionix

11. Topps Lineage   

10. 2002 Bowman 

9. 1988 Donruss 

8. 1995 Emotion XL 

7. 2017 Topps Heritage Minor League

6. 1998 Topps TEK 

5. 1986 Topps Mini League Leaders 

4. 2001 Fleer EX 

3. 1979 Kellogg's 

2. 2002 Topps Super Teams

1. 1983 Topps 

No Vince Coleman Tangents

First off, this post has more 1986 Topps Glossy Mail-In cards, but I am only going to mention Vince Coleman once.  I'm done.  Let's look at some cards.

First off, I skipped a few cards during my first post.  I was trying to show the set off in numerical order, but I missed this grouping of cards.....

with Darryl Strawberry, Ron Guidry, and Chris Brown.  Probably distracted by writing about a Cardinals player and I skipped right over this scan.

Guidry was towards the end of his career, but his 1985 was great.  He led the American League with 22 wins and finished second in Cy Young voting.  Strawberry was not really high on my list in 1986, Cardinals and Mets had a pretty good rivalry at that time, but this is a nice card.  I like the polyester uniform and the action shot.  Nice card.

Chris Brown was a prospect in the set.  Interestingly, he and Strawberry, along with Eric Davis, all came from the same part of Los Angeles, and grew up playing baseball together.  Not sure if Topps put these cards together intentionally.  Brown's baseball career never panned out and he ended up driving trucks in Iraq.  When he returned from Iraq he died from burns as a result of a house fire. Bizarre incident.

The Hershiser card is a second year card.  I often associate the peak of his career as being in 1988 with the Cy Young Award and the World Series title, but 1985 was not far behind.  The 19-3 record with a 2.03 ERA clearly got buried behind Gooden and Tudor that season.

Gary Carter was a catcher.  Again, not a huge fan of the Mets, but he was a really good player.

I learned something with this last card.  I am well versed with Seaver's time with the Mets and Reds, but I also know that I have a bunch of White Sox and Red Sox cards from the time I collected in the 1980s.  Always assumed that those final years were his way to hanging around the game.  It turns out that Seaver still had some good years though.  Picked up his 300th win as a White Sox....

with Richard Nixon in attendance.  Not as good as his years with the Mets and Reds, but not exactly a slouch.  

I actually had all three of these cards when I started this project, but ended up replacing all three of them.  Some soft corners from the younger version of me.  Although, after doing a little cleaning this past weekend, I actually found another copy of the Pedro Guerrero card.  Guessing I might have replaced it while he was on the Cardinals, or at some point afterwards.  

Fisher was a good young pitcher for the Yankees, had a very good 1985 out of the bullpen.  He was actually a member of the 1982 Durham Bulls.  He was traded to the Pirates for Rick Rhoden and was given a chance to start, but injuries derailed his career.  Fisher appeared in only 35 games between 1989 and 1992.  Gibson and Fisk's inclusion is the set is pretty obvious, both very good players at this point.  

The Tommy Herr was the only Cardinals card that I needed for this entire project.  I remember these were sold in groups, but I do not seem to have the break down of these cards.  Obviously I did not get these, I was also missing the Murray and Mattingly.  I used to base the portions of the sets I got on the Cardinals players in each grouping.  If there were enough Cardinals in the set, and they were spread out, then someone got skipped.  Sorry, Tommy.  

Murray is a Hall of Famer, but the Mattingly card would have been a great one to own around this time.  I do not think that Mattingly should be in the Hall, but his first five or six seasons were excellent.  If he had played at that level for a few more years, he would be in.  

 Easy to pick out a favorite card in this set.  That Quisenberry card looks great with the front view of that submarine deliver.  I like that the baseball is a blur in front of Quiz.  I do not specific collect Quisenberry cards, but he was on the Cardinals for a few years at the end of his career.  His cards usually at least catch my eye.  There are a few other 1980s Quisenberry cards with a similar view, but this is the best of them.  

Last set of cards for this post......

This is a hard group to end on.  Who do I like in this group?  I like the brown Padres jersey on the Steve Garvey card.  That's all I got.  The rest of the set next week.  

30 Year Top 50: 1998 Upper Deck Retro

#29- Today, the countdown continues with a trendsetting set of the late 90s.  Several card companies had dabbled with bringing Hall of Famers from the 50s, 60s, and 70s to modern cardboard, but this set kicked off something special that would allow modern collectors access to cards of the previous generations stars.  Before I start breaking down the set I just wanted to mention the packaging.  The boxes for these cards were old school metal lunch boxes.  In my several moves since 1998, I do not have mine anymore, but I encourage you to look around and find one.  Really cool.

1998 Upper Deck Retro Al Kaline

Upper Deck always had some good photography and decent designs with their cards.  The Upper Deck Retro set isn't the flashiest or shiniest designed card set they've assembled, but I like the basic design given the premise of this set being a "retro" set.  The photographs are not all up to the usual Upper Deck standards.  For example, I have always hated the Lou Brock card in this set.  Upper Deck has made hundreds of Lou Brock cards with a decent photo.  Why is he in a celebrity softball game or something with a goofy white hat?  

1998 Upper Deck Retro Lou Brock

The set also has some cool inserts and great autographs.  The autographs are all on card, but are condition sensitive.  Similar to the Upper Deck Sweet Spot autographs, the Retro autographs have a slight tendency to fade.  I own two autographs from this set and unfortunately both are on there way downhill.  The first, Nolan Ryan, isn't bad since I can find other autographed cards.

1998 Upper Deck Retro Nolan Ryan Autograph

More unfortunate is the condition of my second autograph from the set which belongs to Kirby Puckett.  Puckett was not a huge signer and has few autographs out on the secondary market.  He also passed away in 2006 after being elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame.  

1998 Upper Deck Retro Kirby Puckett Autograph

Most Puckett autographs from this set have some degree of fading which is quite sad.  Beyond the Ryan and Puckett there are actually a lot of great autographs in this card set.  Many of the autographs can be found in other products, but the condition sensitivity makes them a great collecting challenge.  

Like the 1998 Upper Deck Retro Set?  Not in my Top 50 is the 2001 Upper Deck 70s set.  This set is filled with big hair and polyester.  The base cards have a similar simple design like the Upper Deck Retro set, but photography might be a little bit better.  There are also fewer autographs, but these are still great cards worth looking into for your collection.  

2001 Upper Deck 70s Andre Dawson

I was thinking of putting a Bellbottoms insert card in this space, but I am going to go with this Disco Dandies set.  The inserts are one of the coolest parts of the Upper Deck 70s set and can all be found generally for under five dollars.  

2001 Upper Deck 70s Disco Era Dandies Tom Seaver

There are autographs in this set, but the list is short and the relics checklist is much longer.  There are some cool relics out there though.  

2001 Upper Deck 70s Eddie Murray Bat