Can We The Blogging Community Come Up With a Better Topps 100???

In response to my post regarding the ballot found at http://vote.topps.com/ and the Topps Company's selection of their Top 100 baseball cards of all time, I received this note from Devon Young who runs the blog titled My First Cards:

Idea...

What if all us card bloggers developed a new list of 100 best Topps cards, and then set up a place for people to vote on them? We could even allow write-in's in case we somehow overlooked a card.

Perhaps each year-specific blogger could nominate 5-10 cards from the set they feature, and bloggers like yourself who cover everything can nominate several from any year, and then after a couple weeks, collect all the nominations and set up a place for people to vote on which are the best?

What do you think?

I don't have the time to organize something like this, but maybe you do?

Devon

I was actually thinking about the possibility of doing my own Topps 100 cards. But with 43,133 in Topps catalog of regular and "traded" cards (not including variations, errors, etc), while there is a lot to choose from, how would I go about doing it? What should MY criteria be?

• Should I go by design aspects?
• Particular player?
• Popularity of the card/player?
• Book value?
• Picture?
• Notoriety (gimmicks)?
• Should subsets (like All-Star cards, Record Breakers cards, Season Highlights cards) be included?
• Should variations (like the legends variations of the last two years) be included?
• Combination of one or more of the above?
• How many cards per year can we have in a ballot? 5? 10? 20?

The thing that I fear the most is that because I only have 35 full years of Topps cards, and only started following baseball since 1987, I'm afraid that I might be biased towards cards and players from 1976 onwards and have a lot of cards dominated by this era than my "retro" period of 1952 (or should we even include 1951) to 1975. I do have my "40 Years of Topps History" and my "300 Greatest Baseball Cards" books, so I do have pictures of, or every card from, Topps 60 years at my disposal.

But I have an idea.

How about this, dear readers? By Sunday night, around 7:00 p.m. CST, I will pick 5 cards from all 60 years (1951-2010)...a Topps 300. They can be rookie cards (which seemed to dominate Topps 100), they could have awesome action shots, they could just be whatever strikes my fancy as a card worth including. After this is done, I will allow a two-week period to allow you the readers to make adjustments to my picks by e-mailing me at bdj610@hotmail.com. You can say, things like, "take this card out and put this one in because..." or, "this card is definitely better than this one (or two) that you picked," or "you're picks are awful. Here's who I'd have picked," or whatever, and if it makes sense, then before all is said and done, I'll have a final ballot (possibly create a third blog, just with ballots akin to the Gummie Awards) for people to vote on their favorites from each year.

By the time all is said and done, we will have the Hobby Blogging Community's very own "Topps 60". And this humble little blog will announce the 60 best cards once a day, just like the Topps will be doing (albeit we won't be able to add cards to the 2011 Topps set ourselves).

But this can only work if (and it's a big IF) this gets a lot of responses from the Hobby Community. It definitely won't work if only seven people comment on changes, or if less than 10 people vote per year (or worse...total). We need active involvement from both the Hobby bloggers and blog readers. We could certainly get input from those who participate in Hobby forums. (We could certainly use readers...Ego!!! Stop it.) We could even wind up with a better Topps 60 than the Topps Company themselves!!!

What do you think? Should we do it?

Sincerely,

JayBee Anama