Taste the Rainbow: Defending the Explosion in Base Parallels
Author’s Note: Although all the card companies have products filled with base parallels, for the purposes of this article, I used the Beckett checklists for Topps Chrome covering the last 10 years. I also did not count printing plates as a parallel.
Long time collectors and wax rippers have undoubtedly noticed a growing trend…that they just keep adding more parallels. From true golds to magenta sparkles to frozenfractors, companies just keep opening the proverbial Crayola box and printing a grab bag of colors and patterns onto the cardboard of our favorite players. What’s next? Macaroni and cheese fractor? One can only hope.
From 2015 Topps Chrome to the latest release in 2024, the parallels Topps (and now Fanatics) has created has grown from a modest 11 variations to an astounding 37 – 2015 (11), 2016 (11), 2017 (15), 2018 (14), 2019 (18), 2020 (18), 2021 (19), 2022 (19), 2023 (26), 2024 (37).
As the hobby grows these companies need to fill demand. Perhaps it is overkill, but the fact of the matter is the likes of Fanatics, Panini, and other companies, are going to grow print runs regardless of ‘hobby responsibility,’ and I for one do not argue against throwing some creativity into it.
I know there is a community of curmudgeons out there who balk at this; they talk about diminishing the values and meanings of classic parallels of true gold, blue, green, etc. Their path of thinking may not be off, but what would you rather pull, a base or something even high numbered? Given values and hype, give me a numbered card, even if it’s plastered with tacos.
Let’s look at a couple of Jackson Holliday cards, a magenta sparkle (#/350) and a sepia refractor (non-numbered). According to eBay’s sold listings when searching for a magenta sparkle refractor of Jackson Holliday, one sold on November 6th for $52.20. Another search uncovered a sepia refractor sold on November 12th for just $8.35.
I know that this is just a drop in the ocean of an example – this is also without knowing the exact print run of the product – but it begs the question, if companies are going to mass produce products, what’s the problem of adding more variations to the lineup?
Can we attribute the flooding of parallels to the Fanatics acquisition of Topps? Maybe. But dating back to 2015 you can still see that number trending upward even before the 2022 changing of the guard. And as a man whose personal collection includes the Mets, I’ll take a blue spotted lizard dog munching Francisco Alvarez numbered to 10,000 over a base card any day.