In my 20-plus years of collecting, I’ve run across my fair share of cards that looked stupid, or just were based upon their subject matter. Enter ‘Stupid Inserts.” In my year and a half as a baseball card blogger, I’ve spent many a moment staring at certain cards — specifically inserts — that several years after their release seem very comedic to me. As a new installment on my blog, I will expose those cardboard failures.
Part I: 2008 Topps “Year in Review”
Somewhere in some office, someone got paid to think up an idea to create an insanely large insert set (like 100 cards) that highlighted certain achievements during the baseball season. Good idea, right? I mean collector’s already ~love~ those “Season Highlights” cards that are already part of the regular set, so they’ll totally embrace an insert set that takes the same crappy theme and beats it into the ground. Well, I’m sure someone signed off on the idea thinking that we’d see some more Derek Jeter or David Wright highlights, but what we ended up with was shit like this Shawn Hill insert that lauds his APRIL effort. Yes, I said April … and so does the headline on this card.
In case you’re wondering, Hill went 2-2 with a 2.76 ERA over five starts and struck out 20 batters over 32 innings … in APRIL. The infograph on the card also notes that he “often looked like an ace when healthy” and didn’t allow more than 2 earned runs in any start during that month. Did I forget to mention this was in April? Hill finished the season with 3.42 ERA over 92 innings, but missed half of May, all of June and July, and half of August with an injury before returning. Was Hill’s April really worth a special insert? Only Shawn Hill’s mom and the guy who thought up this crappy insert set believes that.
I know I am not the first person to point out when companies recycle images for baseball cards. But I might be the first person — OK, maybe not — to ask what the hell Topps was thinking when they created these two 2002 Topps Total Nomar Garciaparra cards.
