I picked up this card in a trade with the Hairylemon from SCF. He held onto this card for me while I ran around making trades in order to prise it from his grasp! I cant remember exactly what I traded for it, I want to say it was a Carl Erskine auto but I honestly cant remember. I suppose I could load up SCF and check but that would be to easy.
This card is from Topps Tribute and was released in 2002. This is my only relic card of Thomson but I hope to add a jersey card and an auto to the collection as soon as I can, although this collection is on the back burner at the moment so I'm not going to actively seek out either the jersey or auto until I finish off a few other projects. That's not to say I wont trade for either an auto or a jersey card if one was offered, I'd even consider buying if the price was right.
Tribute was re-released last year and it looked good. But there were some issues with the cards and the questionable relics that were included. Where did they come from? People who opened these packs were met with a disclaimer on the back of the card 'The relics contained in this card are not from any specific game, event, or season' ( It actually says this on most, if not all relic cards now). It soon came to light that many of the so called bat relics were in fact stadium relics, pieces of seats from the stadium. This upset quite a few people who thought they were getting a genuine piece of history and not a piece of wood that had endured years of abuse from the sweaty cracks of overweight baseball fans. The card I have from 2002 says 'Authentic game used bat'. Now I haven't looked into to it very much and for all I know Topps pulled the same trick back then that they did last year. I can only go with what is written on the back of the card. No where in the small print on the back of the card does it mention where the bat came from. I suppose with a player like Thomson there are plenty of GU bats available and to be honest the guy is still kicking so what would stop Topps putting a bat in his hand now and throwing a ball at him and calling that game used? Like so many relics available in this hobby we have to use a little faith and a lot of trust in where they actually came from.
With that said and done this is still one of the prize cards of my collection and I'm proud to own it.
Tribute is being released again this year, quite soon I think. I guess that it will still be an expensive product ( last year was around $200 a pack) so I will not be picking any up. I'll just wait for the big spenders to bust a bunch of cases and then pick up their 'big mojo hits' on Ebay for a fraction of the price of a single pack.
Just a reminder from a previous post - The Sheffield card mystery has still not been solved but I have had some interesting answers. There will be a prize for whoever can tell me where it could have come from. If a definitive answer is not found I will give the prize to whichever answer seems to be the most likely. I don't know what the prize is yet but it will be an auto or a relic card, maybe even both.
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