2014 Topps Series 1 Baseball Includes Rookie Buybacks

Topps plans to give away original copies of its 50 best rookie cards of all-time as part of 2014 Topps Series One Baseball.  The company announced plans for next year’s flagship brand on Monday, offering a look at what collectors will see when the product is released the last week of January.

The ‘Rookie Buybacks’ would presumably include cards such as the 1952 Topps Mickey Mantle, 1952  Willie Mays, 1954 Hank Aaron, 1955 Sandy Koufax and Roberto Clemente and others.

The other new promotion will be a Pennant Chase game.  Each Major League team will have a card and at the end of the season, collectors holding cards of the pennant-winning teams will be able to redeem them for a prize.

The promotional slogan for 2014 Topps Baseball will be ‘The Future is Now’, highlighting the large influx of new stars who have entered the big leagues over the last few seasons.  ‘Future Stars’ labels return to the front of the newest of the newcomers.  Look for inserts, autographs, and autographed relics from the likes of Wil Myers, Manny Machado, Jurickson Profar and more.

The basic formula for Series One (and presumably Series Two) remains much the same as it has been: a 330-card base set, several parallel sets (this year’s will include a clear stock version numbered to 10), a variety of inserts and the usual autographs, relics and manufactured relics.

Topps will highlight the 2013 season with a Highlights series in the base set and also in the autograph and relic issues with ‘Post Season Performance’ and ‘World Series Champion’ cards making their debut.  Autographs will likely be on stickers because of the quick turnaround time before release but they will be numbered to 50.

Trajectory inserts feature the progression of a player’s performance from his rookie season to now.   Look for stars like  David Wright, Paul Goldschmidt, Evan Gattis and Yoenis Cespedes.

Before They Were Great are exclusive high-end cards printed on thick stock featuring 30 of the best active players and retired stars like Pedro Martinez, Mike Schmidt and Willie Mays.  Look for autographed versions #’d to 10, Gold Parallels #d to 99 and Relics #’d to 25.  These cards feature images of the greats from their early playing days.

Upper Class inserts, relics and autographs include 50 of the best rookie classes of all time.  Each player in the class will have their own card, but when the player cards of the same class are put together, it creates a class photo.  Look for Upper Class Autographs (25 subjects #’d  to 25), Upper Class Relics (25 subjects #’d to 99) and Upper Class Autographed Relics (25 subjects # to 25).

Topps will produce an insert set based around the 1989 Topps mini issue with the 2014 version including a die-cut series, some of which will be autographed.

The Topps Strata brand will show up in Series One with on-card autographs of active and retired stars including some cut signatures.

Super Veterans is a throwback name to the 1983 Topps set, but they’ll only be available in retail boxes at Walmart and Target.  Exclusive autographs (#’d  to 10), relics (#’d  to 25) and autographed relics (#’d to 5) from players like David Ortiz, Prince Fielder, Miguel Cabrera and others are featured.

Topps has also released information on its 2014 Factory Set, scheduled for release in mid-July.  The set includes all 660 cards from Series One and Series Two along with a pack of five numbered base orange parallel cards.

2014 Topps Series One baseball cards are scheduled for release in hobby shops Wednesday, January 29.  See a preliminary checklist and more information via the links below.  Click here to see 2014 Topps Baseball Series One boxes for sale.

2014 Topps 1 Baseball Checklist

2014 Topps Baseball Series One Sell Sheet

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About Rich Mueller

Rich is the editor and founder of Sports Collectors Daily. A broadcaster and writer for more than 30 years and a collector for even longer than that, he's usually typing something somewhere. Type him back at [email protected]