If This is His Topps Card, Then What Card is This?: Ichiro Suzuki

On this week's edition of "If This is His Topps Card, Then What Card is This?" we step away from the base cards for a moment and focus on insert cards. This week's subject is Seattle Mariners superstar Ichiro Suzuki (or Ichiro to the card companies).

Continuing on the success of it's "Rookie of the Week" promotion in 2006, Topps continued the program in 2007 with a set called "Flashback Fridays." The goal here was to get customers into the hobby shops and spend some money on packs or boxes of Topps product to get a card from this set. Depending on the shop (if they even followed the program), they were to include a free card from this set, one per week, if a customer bought a certain dollar amount worth of product. The first five cards (from a 25 card set) were included in a pack that could be bought for a nickel (or free, depending on the whim of the store owner). The rest were (ideally) to be distributed one per week.

Now the set itself paid homage to the little known (outside of hobby circles anyway) 1933 DeLong Gum set (R133 for those who follow the ACC). The original set consisted of 24 cards, and included a number of Hall of Fame players, including Rabbit Maranville, Lefty Grove, Jimmie Foxx, and, the most valuable card in the set, Lou Gehrig. It featured a black and white picture of the player superimposed over a cartoon stadium background, which made the players look like giants compared to the minutely drawn characters on the field (they were even larger than the stadium).

For fans of the Japanese superstar, week 11 of the program was the week to show up if they wanted the Ichiro card from this set. With the set called "Flashback Fridays", this card should have been given away on or around June 15, 2007 (rough estimate).

So, here is the card given away as part of the Flashback Friday promotion:



Like I said, compared to the players drawn on the field, even at 5'9", Ichiro is a giant on the field. Okay, that said, let's go on to card #2 shall we:


He looks a little smaller here (not by much, but still) compared to card number one. It's still Ichiro, this time at the end of his follow through and ready to dash towards first. But this card is not from the hobby shop promotion. It's not a variation card, and it definitely was not inserted into packs at the card shop.

So just like last week, it is up to you to figure out...

What Card is This?

I'll post the answer to this tomorrow night. Have fun trying to figure this one out.

Sincerely,

JayBee Anama

UPDATE: Monday, September 29, 2008.

An anonymous poster, on his second guess, correctly answered that the second card was from the 2007 Topps WalMart set. The second card (#WM15) could only be found in blaster boxes of 2007 Topps Series I sold at WalMart.

Thanks for playing. We'll try it again next week.

jba