Topps Chrome Baseball came out this week due to Strasburg
prices had skyrocketed in the wake of 2010 Bowman. Then the phenom met Tommy John and most of the Topps world came crashing down price wise. Since release there have been a number of variables that have attributed to the complaining about the product.
The original sell sheets had 25 autographs listed on the checklist, the final product came out with 50 autographs. With the original checklist you could reasonably expect to complete at least most of the set, barring short prints, out of a case including autographs. But Strasburg came along, and completely blew expectations out of the water. This has typically been a great product for player collectors. It hasn’t been super over printed, so you can expect a good deal of color out of a case break.
This year came out and due to the rookie phenoms that have hit Major League Baseball this season demand was incredible. Prices skyrocketed, but at the same time orders skyrocketed as opposed to past seasons due to people wanting to hit the autographs of Jason Heyward, Stanton, Castro, Strasburg
and more. To meet the increased demand Topps had to either make the autographs less plentiful per box, or they could add more to the checklist.
The other option would have been to short everyone on their orders, and demand for the product would have been insane. This would be great for the people who had already pre ordered, and were locked in but Topps is in the business to make money. People let emotions take over when expecting a return on a product and forget that the main people trying to make money off the breaks would be the companies producing the cards.
So the main question was is this product an epic fail, or were expectations too high? Topps should have put the information out sooner than they did to establish expectations, but also collectors, or more so investors shouldn’t have expected this product to be a completely different animal than it has been in the past. 2010 Bowman isn’t going to repeat success wise over and over. I’d look at this comparably to the Comic Book Explosion of the 90′s, people ordered millions and millions of copies of stuff like X Men #1, and Robin #1, or the death of Superman and a lot of those at first made money, but as more and more issues came out and looked to capitalize on that wave it got ugly.
There is only one horse in the Baseball race right now, and that is Topps, so they need to wade this road carefully. There is such a finite niche to the collecting arena today as opposed to ten years ago. Topps needs the big breakers, they need the distributors, and the final branch on the tree is the casual breaker. Topps needs all of them, they can not afford to alienate any of those groups. But at the same time, all the collectors have to step back and realize that Sports Cards are a business, the companies need to make money to continue producing products.
The price of Topps Chrome Baseball is dropping at this point, but who’s fault is it? I think everyone is to blame, the collectors expected too much, and in turn ordered too much. This caused Topps to print to fit demand, which angered the collectors because they expected every product at this point to be along the same lines of 2010 Bowman, which really was a unique product. People didn’t over order 2010 Bowman, in fact due to the fact that people had underestimated the product you could say that people severely under ordered it. Topps could have just increased the print runs of the existing 25 autographs to meet demand, but at the same time collectors have to understand the logistics of acquiring the signatures for the cards especially for the demand of on card signatures.
I think everyone just has to take a step back and think of how this product has been previously, and realize that the potential hits of this years Chrome product far surpass previous years by a long shot. Everyone just needs to temper expectations this year due to the Strasarm injury, and hope to recoup some potential losses and hope for the USA guys to explode like Harper or Strasburg did in the past.
Although the 2010 Team USA same day autographs look absolutely terrible. There is no defending Topps on those.
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