It’s here! It’s here! It’s finally here! After waiting five friggin’ months, my 2009 Topps WBC card of Gift Ngoepe is here! Someone alert the press … or make that restart the presses.

I arrived home Friday night to find an envelope from Tri-Star Fulfillment — Topps redemption distributor — and within the package was my Gift. Not exactly the most anticipated card of the year, but no doubt one I’d been waiting seeing as how the Topps Web site has stated “card has been shipped” for nearly a month.

So imagine my anger when I opened the package and saw this crap. Is the front of this card really off-center 20-80 left/right, and 20/80 up and down? Yep … and the back is the same way.

Is it that hard to make sure that a redemption card is at least centered OK? I understand that not all cards can be perfect, but you’d at least expect them to be in passable condition. I mean where the hell was Inspection Checker 23 on this one?

Looks like Gift Ngoepe is the gift that keeps on giving. This garbage is headed right back to Topps for a replacement. It’s not about value right now, it’s about principle.

And a quick birthday shout out to South Africa’s former President Nelson Mandela, the Nobel Peace Prize winner who turns 91 today (July 18).

This entry was posted on July 18, 2009 at 8:25 am and is filed under Newspaperman with tags baseball, baseball cards, cards, Gift Ngoepe, Nelson Mandela, South Africa, sports, Topps, World Baseball Classic. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.