By Rich Klein
Topps Triple Threads baseball has been around as a product for several years now. The best aspect of this popular product is that most of the players represented on these cards are going to be among the best from the past and present. According to the “master box” which consists of two “mini-boxes”, each seven-card mini box includes both a relic card and an autographed relic. So, you’ll pull four hits and two autographs per master box.
In simplest terms, which means unless you are fortunate enough to procure one of the multi-autograph book cards from the mini-box, your “hit” percentage is nearly 30 percent. That does not include “smaller’ hits such as parallel cards, and since we pulled two parallel cards in each mini-box, that really means a collector receives less base cards than the combination of parallels and “hits”.
Previewed in the spring, 2011 Topps Triple Threads was released in late September. The current price online is in the $195-210 range. Each mini-box of seven cards will set a collector back to the tune of about $15 per card. Even with base cards numbered to 1500, that’s a lot of dough. There are, unfortunately, some redemption cards with this product.
The good news with Triple Threads is that along with each card being serial numbered, there are some potentially major hits. It’s a product for someone who’s willing to roll the dice but it does pack some baseball history.
The new Unity Relics allow collectors to build little panoramic scenes by collecting all of a particular player and piecing them together.
We had the chance to open a full master box and here’s what came out.
Base Cards (#d to 1500): Roy Campanella, Joe DiMaggio, Mickey Mantle, Paul Molitor, Stan Musial, CC Sabathia
Sepia Parallels (#d to 649): Bob Gibson, Carlos Santana
Emerald Parallel (#d to 249): Mark Teixeira
Relics Red (#d to 36): Al Kaline
Unity Relic Emerald (#d to 18): Ryan Zimmerman
Unity Autograph Relic (#d to 99): Tyler Colvin
Autograph Relic: Dan Haren (This was a redemption so no details about print runs are available)
As we say, gambling on boxes like this is not for the faint of heart. While many of the cards found in our box of 2011 Topps Triple Threads are nice additions to collections, our autographs weren’t exactly top notch. Our best hope is that Tyler Colvin returns to the path he had a rookie in 2010 doesn’t have a repeat of 2011.
How popular is the product? Popular enough so there’s a lot of ripping going on. There were over 6600 listings on eBay as of Tuesday night.
Rich Klein can be reached at [email protected]
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