I don't think cards for the playoffs have been all that common in Topps Baseball sets. Some years yes, most years no. Far more years probably include World Series cards, but only those.
But overall, I would have to think cards for the Division Series, or the Wild Card, would have to have been made much less often than for the League Championship Series.
I hesitated on how to label this post. The Topps checklist lists it as "Detroit Tigers®" but that doesn't feel right to me, even though the Tigers are my favorite team. There are 2 teams in every series of course. The Tigers won the series, so that is plenty of satisfaction for them already. I also think labeling such a card by the actual series will be more useful later, perhaps, when I'm really old and forgetful.
On this particular card, the Series One cover player, Prince Fielder, takes center stage. The true hero of that particular game is on the left side of the card, being hugged by some other team-mates. Fielder went 1-for-5 in this game, with an RBI, from just a single, and contributed little in the rest of the series. Tigers fans never had much to celebrate about Fielder in October.
So it goes with "celebration" cards, which seem to have about a 50% shot at accurately depicting the player that did the most to create the celebration. On some such cards, Topps accurately shows off a game hero. On others, not so much. That's about how I feel about these types of cards - once in a while, I think "heck yeah" - other times, not so much.
Uniform Hero? Topps finesses this checklist decision quite well, with the first non-player card in the set. Otherwise, they would have only one choice of player to place here: Mariano Rivera.
Clearly, some star players have to be held every year for inclusion in Series Two, which is where we will eventually find Rivera. Still, the decision seems a little puzzling, given all the All-Star power assembled in the first 1/13th of the checklist, overall.
It has always seemed to me that everyone around MLB was always quite contented that the last player to wear #42 was an obvious future Hall of Famer, so I will always be a little bemused that Topps didn't show off the uniform<>checklist connection a little extra explicitly, right here.
Where’d the egg hatch? The Detroit Tigers first played a baseball game in 1894. In 1901, their league, the American League, declared itself a "Major" league, and their stats and history are recorded as part of MLB from that year forward.
How about the migrations? The Tigers have not had any franchise moves since that 1901 debut. They have gone 4-7 in the World Series, with their last victory coming in 1984.
Don’t flip over real Turtles.
On this side of the card, Topps does celebrate the true hero of the series for the Tigers, including some thoughts and stats for his Win in Game 1 as well.
I have never seen the point of printing a line score of a game on the back of a baseball card.
A complete box score would be far more entertaining, and given 21st Century type sizes and printing technology, I have always felt one could be printed on a card rather easily. Plus, the Topps card back writer could take a break, and let the box score do all the work.
Bling That Shell I didn't really find access to the Orange parallels all that early in this project. I was mostly avoiding single card purchases on eBay, as with $3 shipping on every card, I would never be able to get many cards that way for this project. Over time, I found non-eBay sellers where I could purchase multiple cards for a single shipping charge. When I found a seller with a couple dozen of the /230 Factory Set Orange parallels that I could use, I pounced on this one:
