The guy at Trader Crack's broke the news, and I went to the website for confirmation, but it appears that although Topps lost the NFL rights, they have gained something potentially better.
MiLB.com (the official site for Minor League Baseball) has just announced that the Topps Company, home of Major League Baseball cards for almost 60 years, has just signed an exclusive agreement to be the official licensee of Minor League Baseball cards.
Read all about it here.
So what does this mean?
According to Warren Friss, Topps' Vice President, that "Now we're the only trading card licensed by both Major League Baseball and Minor League Baseball, and we look forward to a lasting relationship with both Leagues."
But what does this mean for Topps' major league products? Will this mean that Topps will now include draft pick cards and future star cards in the eponymous brands? Will Topps even be allowed to do that? What about Bowman? Will there be a need to create a prospect cards "insert set" with all the parallels, chrome, and other bells and whistles? Will Bowman become a minor league brand?
As most of us already know, there is also the matter of the minor league "debut card" logo that the licensing arms wanted Tristar (good luck in all future endeavors by the way) to include when players made their debut onto a minor league card. The press release states that Topps has the exclusive rights to the logo. Will this mean that a player can have a Pro Debut card AND a MLB Rookie card???
And what does this mean for minor league cards as a whole? Will regular card collectors jump in and buy minor league Topps cards? Will set collectors want in on this? Heck, will Topps set collectors want to get in on this? Speaking for me, I would have to see what the cards are going to look like first?
But most importantly...
Will this mean the return of Topps MLB debut???
So many questions, so much time to speculate as the first Topps Minor League product, known as Topps Pro Debut Series 1 (meaning there will be more than ONE SERIES of this product) will be coming out in March.
Sincerely,
JayBee Anama
4 comments:
This is great and finally we will have a definite answer (and easy to understand method) of determining a players rookie card. One Company will make all the cards and collectors will benefit because (if this happened in 2008), Topps would have produced Gordon Beckham's first pro debut card and in 2009 his first major league rookie card. Collectors could have both or either.
I hope they don't put minor league cards in MLB packs. That would be worse than getting non-baseball cards (Presidents, Mountains, other sports).
I suppose we'll have better distribution for the minor league sets now.
I will be interested to see what this means for Bowman.
One company controlling everything is never good! It's called a Monopoly. I personally like a wide selection from different companies.
More important...how will Razor and TriStar get around this in creating minor league cards? Will they print cards and just keep the team logos off?
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