One of my favorite things to do as part of making custom cards is making sunset cards of players. For those who don't know what those are, a sunset card is the last card of a player, which can mean many things. To me, it means the card has to be a part of a set the year after a players final season, so it can show their final career stats. For many players, like Mickey Mantle, Tom Seaver, and Derek Jeter, it has happened that way, and Topps has made cards of them in the set released the year after they retired. For too many others, like Hank Aaron, Mike Schmidt, Ken Griffey, Jr., Topps dropped the ball. This has allowed me the opportunity to make sunset cards of hundreds of great players.
I have recently given thought to making a binder featuring a players true Topps sunset card. Sunset cards are a lot cheaper than rookie cards, and offer a view of how good the player was with their complete career stats on the back. I am sticking to mostly 'star' and 'semistar' players. This new binder idea has given me 2 problems while trying to get cards together for the binder. First, did Topps make a true sunset card of them? For a good number of them, Topps didn't even make one (you'll get my point a bit later). The other problem that arose is that while Topps may have given them a sunset card, I may or may not have the card in my collection.
I spent the last week or so trying to locate sunset cards in my collection. I found a list of Topps sunset cards for every Hall of Famer, and had a few of them, and also spent a few hours looking through binders and googling every player who I thought I found a sunset card of to see if it actually was. These are the true sunset cards I came up with (I took the liberty to allow reprints in the binder as well, since I do that with my rookie card binder).
Not too many. Maybe enough for a few pages. I figured I would add the '95 Topps Spectra Light/Cyberstats parallel cards to guys who had a '95 Topps sunset card, since the Spectra/Cyber cards had the computer generated stats added. I am sure I am missing cards from my collection, and there are a number of cards that I don't have (Jeter, Helton, Konerko, etc.). If you can think of any true sunset cards that exist that aren't in these 2 pictures, please let me know so I can try to get this album as complete as possible.
Now on to the guys that I know don't have sunset cards. Since I keep pretty thorough checklists of cards that never were, I tend to know about most guys who are missing a sunset card. I have made many of them, but there are many guys who have sunset cards that are on my list, but I haven't made a card of. Also another problem. I went through my custom files, and put together sheets of 6 cards that I will print out that feature sunset cards. I started with the '88 Topps set, since that's where the majority of my customs start. Here are all of the customs sunset cards that I have.
On the final sheet, I added some Draft Pick cards that I will add to my rookie card binder. While not quite as many as I thought, that was almost 100 sunset cards that Topps missed out on producing, and that is only from 1988 to now. There are many cards that I left out just because I didn't want to be printing customs all day, and also note that from around 2002 to the present, many of the checklists are incomplete, and there are dozens of cards left off that could easily make my sunset card binder.
It sucks that most of these customs won't have backs to show the players final stats, but it will still be nice to put them in binders, and then maybe one day look at them with my son and tell him about all of the great players I got to see play. Hopefully Topps will give us a 2019 Topps Ichiro card. Speaking of 2019 Topps, I had a post on August 7th of last year where I made a custom 2018 Topps Rob Manfred card (which he still hasn't returned back signed). That means that the 2018 Topps design was at least out on August 7th (probably earlier, since I had enough time to make a custom out of it). I have been googling 2019 Topps baseball a few times a week since the beginning of August in anticipation of maybe seeing the design, but so far, nothing. Why did they tease us with a pretty early release of the design last year, and then make us wait this year? I'm not expecting anything good, but it is still cool to see what everyone else thinks of the design.
If you have any sunset cards that you know of, please leave me your lists, and I will go through my binders to see if I have them to add to my sunset binder. I hope this was an informative post.
Thanks for reading.
-Jeremy
I have recently given thought to making a binder featuring a players true Topps sunset card. Sunset cards are a lot cheaper than rookie cards, and offer a view of how good the player was with their complete career stats on the back. I am sticking to mostly 'star' and 'semistar' players. This new binder idea has given me 2 problems while trying to get cards together for the binder. First, did Topps make a true sunset card of them? For a good number of them, Topps didn't even make one (you'll get my point a bit later). The other problem that arose is that while Topps may have given them a sunset card, I may or may not have the card in my collection.
I spent the last week or so trying to locate sunset cards in my collection. I found a list of Topps sunset cards for every Hall of Famer, and had a few of them, and also spent a few hours looking through binders and googling every player who I thought I found a sunset card of to see if it actually was. These are the true sunset cards I came up with (I took the liberty to allow reprints in the binder as well, since I do that with my rookie card binder).
Now on to the guys that I know don't have sunset cards. Since I keep pretty thorough checklists of cards that never were, I tend to know about most guys who are missing a sunset card. I have made many of them, but there are many guys who have sunset cards that are on my list, but I haven't made a card of. Also another problem. I went through my custom files, and put together sheets of 6 cards that I will print out that feature sunset cards. I started with the '88 Topps set, since that's where the majority of my customs start. Here are all of the customs sunset cards that I have.
It sucks that most of these customs won't have backs to show the players final stats, but it will still be nice to put them in binders, and then maybe one day look at them with my son and tell him about all of the great players I got to see play. Hopefully Topps will give us a 2019 Topps Ichiro card. Speaking of 2019 Topps, I had a post on August 7th of last year where I made a custom 2018 Topps Rob Manfred card (which he still hasn't returned back signed). That means that the 2018 Topps design was at least out on August 7th (probably earlier, since I had enough time to make a custom out of it). I have been googling 2019 Topps baseball a few times a week since the beginning of August in anticipation of maybe seeing the design, but so far, nothing. Why did they tease us with a pretty early release of the design last year, and then make us wait this year? I'm not expecting anything good, but it is still cool to see what everyone else thinks of the design.
If you have any sunset cards that you know of, please leave me your lists, and I will go through my binders to see if I have them to add to my sunset binder. I hope this was an informative post.
Thanks for reading.
-Jeremy
Coincidence city. 2019 images came out today!
ReplyDeleteIt’s about time! Just looked at them now and first thoughts are they really don’t impress me. Looks like ‘82 and ‘90 had a baby.
ReplyDeleteLove the idea behind Sunset Cards. I'd probably start my own binder if I had the skills to create custom cards myself... and if I had any room left on my binder shelves.
ReplyDeleteI love sunset cards. Years ago, I was trying to find the more obscure cards of major players who played on many different teams (Think Phil Neikro on the Indians and Blue Jays) but I always looked for those final cards with all their stats on the back.
ReplyDelete