Without a doubt you’ve heard today that Major League Baseball Properties and Upper Deck have reached a settlement in their pending lawsuit. In a nutshell, UD cannot produce baseball cards in the future showing any MLBP logos without permission. This means no action shots with jersey logos or team names exposed. It also means that any release that UD had already in the works cannot be sold.

But what I am wondering is how this settlement was influenced by Topps announcement earlier in the day that it now owns the exclusive rights to produce baseball cards of Team USA Baseball.

For nearly a decade, Upper Deck was the exclusive producer of USA Baseball cards. With Topps now taking that license away from them (indirectly) it almost seems as if Upper Deck really had little to fight for, and thus we have the settlement.

To me it seems as if UD could have used the license with Team USA to produce cards of hobby phenom Bryce Harper and other youngsters and inserted those cards into any of the unlicensed sets to give them some appeal to most collectors. But since they are no longer able to produce such cards, there really was little that UD had to offer in the sport other than unlicensed cards.

Now it is entirely possible that the two issues have nothing to do with one another, but I find the timing of all of this kind of odd. Thoughts?

This entry was posted on March 3, 2010 at 6:43 pm and is filed under Newspaperman with tags baseball, baseball cards, lawsuit, Major League Baseball, Team USA, Topps, Upper Deck. 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.