2011 Topps Lineage Part 1

Hopefully, you've noticed I've been gone for over a week and missed me. I was on vacation with the family back to Philadelphia, where it was blessedly cool and rainy. Not like the furnace called Houston where I currently live.

Some new product came out while I was gone, Topps Lineage and Bowman Platinum. I bought a disappointing blaster of Lineage and a couple of rack packs of the Bowman Platinum. Here are some base cards from Topps Lineage. I'll feature some insert cards and the relic card I got in another post.

I'm not real excited about this product. The design looks like a reject from the regular Topps set. The photography is pretty much conventional baseball card stuff. The player's name, the set name and the player position is in silver foil that does not scan well. The backs are about as boring as you can imagine.I got a few players I collect, 2 Phillies (Hamels and Halladay), and one Astro, Hunter Pence, now also a Phillie (yeah!). As an aside, I managed to find a Phillie Hunter Pence tee-shirt while in Phillie and can hardly wait to wear it to a Phillies-Astros game in September.

I like the veteran cards, and who wouldn't like a Cal Ripken card. There do not seem to be all that many post-career Ripken cards about.

Some of the veteran player cards feature a pose from their rookie year along with the old (and huge) Topps All-Star Rookie Cup. There may be a later career card of McCovey as well. I got two Joe Morgan cards, one as a rookie with the Astros, one as a Red; and two Tom Seaver cards, one as a rookie with the Mets and the other as a Red. These cards are cut so badly that I don't want to bother showing them.
And that's my major gripe with this product, the poor quality. Of the 47 base cards in the box, 19, an unacceptably high number, were miss-cut. This Chad Billingsley card is typical. Note that the top of the card has the border cut off. It's hard to tell from this scan but the card is not square either. Others have the bottom border cut off. None of these miss-cut cards are square. When you pay 35 cents/card, you expect better quality.

The back has part of another colored card showing at the bottom. And is cut way short at the top.