Fill your heart and lungs

Can the patches get any bigger? Yes, they sure did. Over time they went from the game-changing spec embedded in a card to jumbo size, to booklets, to booklet panels, etc. Can the trend continue? I would say the trend will continue.

I saw a movie preview about a guy who takes a pill and becomes the perfected version of himself. Improving oneself is a noble cause and you combine that with our cultural fascination with pills and you end up with another Hollywood movie. Yet, is the movie premise a far stretch from reality. The movie’s preview highlights a clear pill. The pill, a delivery system that the pioneering men and women in our pharmaceutical industry created to get medicine to the masses, is at the very heart of this movie.

I’m totally cool with this idea, but the movie involves a young ambitious man and probably leans toward a Faustian cautionary tale for its plot. I haven’t seen the movie. So, in the movie preview the main character says something similar to “I can see fifty moves ahead of you.” This is a very alluring statement. He can’t see his destiny but his heightened abilities allow him to out think the average person by fifty steps.

It’s what movies are made of: Good Stuff. But, what if everyone had one of those pills? What if every last person on the planet had one of those pills? I suppose a stronger pill would be developed. Can you imagine having the entire planet’s population on those pills? Everyone would become their perfected version of themselves. It would supplant the obvious advantage of taking the pill in the first place. Again, the movie looks entertaining and if anyone on FCB worked on the film by no means am I criticizing it because it does lift up important questions that only we can answer for ourselves about our flaws and living with our flaws.

So, if you could see where the card industry is headed would you save money for tomorrow? Of course not. Cards are grounded in the players of the time. Furthermore, card designs are being built to house bigger and badder Patches, Relics and Autos. But, is their a tipping point where these amazing cards become more common place and is that such a bad thing? Will there be a day where Autos on cards will loose their intrinsic value? Where would value come from? A player’s appeal is a timeless answer to that question. Still, the conversation oscillates between the gradual redefining of what the collector values because the marketplace and product continue to redefine it, and a collector making purchase choices using concepts and ideas that are obsolete because this year’s hobby is not like last year’s hobby. Let alone the hobby I knew growing up. Isn’t baseball card collecting absolutely the best?

Wow. FCB's very own Hunter S. Thompson.

Some would argue autos and patches already have peaked. What was novel 5-10 years ago is commonplace today. Patches and autos are a gimmick to me, not the soul of the hobby but the silicon implants - makes the cards sexy but isn't the essence of their true beauty. The player's image on the card is the true constant through the years. A baseball card is a captured glimpse of a moment in time of a player's career, one season at a time. You can have your mega-jumbo patches. I want a scrapbook filled with the faces of the men who played the game, frozen in time, just as I remember them. That's timeless. And it's not subject to questionable certificates of authenticity, forgery, faking, or event-worn nonsense.

Pictures really are what make the card...

If you think about it, I have seen some sick patches/autos with no pic of the player... It's almost sickening to see what the company could have done to improve upon such a cool card (minus the fact that licensing comes into play).

That's why the Topps base set is so refreshing every year...

gracecollector - Well said, sir.......well said.

I would cut back on the speed.