In my quest to get caught up on some of the recent Topps baseball sets I’ve missed I opted for something a little different for 2007 Topps Series 1 Baseball. Rather than getting the traditional hobby box I went for what I discovered was the “Retail Flow Box”: 24 packs of 22 cards. The only insert was a stick of gum housed in a compartment above each pack.
I’ve always loved the jumbo packs. It makes building sets fast and painless. I just always seem to get a lot more bang out of them. So that’s what I thought I had. Bought off of eBay, the seller listed all the possible inserts for all the both retail and hobby options but didn’t signify that there wouldn’t be any inserts in this particular box. I thought there was going to be a few inserts to break the base set monotony, but it wasn’t so. Oh, well. My primary reason was to build the set anyways. So I’ll just show my dissatisfaction with the seller by spending my money elsewhere.
It turns out a retail flow pack is like a jumbo pack mixed with a rack pack. The packaging was meant to hang off of racks. There was one compartment for the fat pack and another above prominently showing off the old school stick of gum. You could see both the top and bottom card of the pack, which on purpose or by fluke, showed a lot of star cards.
I achieved my goal of building a base set, although I was a little worried. It came down to a tense last pack with only one card to go. Thankfully card 304 was there and all frustration was saved.
I’m not overly excited about this set. The thick black borders are okay and the foil is used much more moderately than the 2006 set, but overall the photography is horrendous. It looks as though many of the front photos were taken from television screen grabs. They’re often blurry and flat. There’s really no excuse for this given the size of the picture on the front is pretty small when the border is taken into account.
On the card backs, the comics from last year have been replaced by a cropped head shot from the card front photo. I like the contrast the black borders and the text bring here and the complete detailed stats are still the major selling point for me with this base set.
A lot of attention was given to the Derek Jeter card. It features an “error” of Mickey Mantle’s ghost in the Yankee dugout and President Bush standing prominently and sharp in a crowd full of unfocused fans. Whatever this slipped through the cracks. The card was a clever marketing scheme used to sell packs. I don’t think anyone should mind too much as it brought attention to the hobby and likely got more than a few people busting packs again. It may have been for the wrong reasons they were getting back into it, but at least there wasn’t some switch where there were several different versions of the card like the Alex Gordon “error” last year.
I guess it comes down to the fact that I don’t like to change my collecting habits so even though 2007 Topps Series 1 is mediocre, I’ll still eventually track down the second and third series and then move on to 2008.
2007 Topps Series 1 Baseball Box Breakdown:
Packs per box: 24
Cards per pack: 22
Total cards: 528
Cards in set: 330
Singles: 330
Doubles: 198
Triples+: 0
