For collectors who enjoy finding cards at retail stores, Panini America’s 2020 Prestige Football fits the bill.

For the third straight year, Prestige is retail-exclusive, and collectors can choose from several packaging options: Mega-boxes have 10 packs, with four cards to a pack. This product yields the biggest hits, with two autographs per box. It also has 12 rookies, four inserts and three parallels.

Blasters have eight packs, with eight cards to a pack. A collector can expect to pull either an autograph or relic card, along with eight rookies, three parallels and five inserts.
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Hanger boxes contain 60 cards, while fat packs have 30. The fat boxes include four rookies, two parallels and four inserts.

​There is also a gravity feed box, which has 36 rookies, 18 parallels and 18 inserts.

Searching for retail can be an adventure at times. I was at a Target recently when the distributor arrived to put out new card product. We chatted for a bit, and he noted how some products simply “flew off the shelves” after they were put on display. Think Bowman 2020 baseball, for example.

“I’m not kidding, there are like five or six guys following me and they have a network,” the man said. “They call each other and buy all the stuff and split it among themselves.”

Well, what else are you going to do during a pandemic? There certainly aren’t any card shows going on right now.
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The Prestige set is notable for having a card of quarterback Tom Brady in the uniform of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Whether Brady or the Bucs — and the entire NFL, for that matter — play this year is open to conjecture. Only the virus knows for sure.

​The base set contains 300 cards, broken down into 200 veterans and 100 rookies. The blaster box I opened had 50 base cards, seven rookies, six inserts and one relic card.

Unlike the 2019 set, the 2020 rookies are not featured in their pro uniforms. They are depicted in action shots from their college careers. Again, blame the pandemic.
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The card fronts are clean and reflect some parallel lines. The top of the card has the Prestige logo stamped in silver against the primary team color of the featured player. In the bottom right-hand corner, the player’s team and name are stamped in silver. They are slanted to complement the slanted lines that run across the top and partially down the sides of the card fronts. The player’s name is backed by the team’s primary color.

​The card back uses a smaller cropped version of the player’s photo that graces the front. A five-line biography is placed under the player’s name and team. The type is ragged center and small, which is kind of disconcerting. Statistics, where available, showcase the players’ 2019 and career numbers.
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Six inserts were pulled from this blaster. Two came from the 20-card Power House subset and featured Travis Henry and Mark Ingram II. Ingram’s card was a blue Xtra Points parallel.

Other inserts I pulled included Inside the Numbers (Mike Williams), Youth Movement (Josh Jacobs), Prestigious Pros (Russell Wilson) and Worldwide (Jameis Winston).
The other four parallel cards collectors could find are Heroes, which has a comic book look; Highlight Reel; Honor Roll; Old School; and Impressions.

The hot card pulled from the blaster was a Gridiron Heritage relic of Rob Gronkowski. The card is printed on thick stock and has a dark blue swatch from Gronk’s days as a tight end with the New England Patriots.

Prestige promises to be an interesting set to build. It has enough rookie cards in a blaster box to make collectors want to complete the whole set, and getting either and autograph or a memorabilia card is a big plus for a retail product.

Here's a story I wrote for Sports Collectors Daily about a pair of Michael Jordan autographed sneakers that are heading to auction this week:
www.sportscollectorsdaily.com/signed-michael-jordan-rookie-year-sneakers-expected-to-fetch-big-price/

Thanks to the husband and wife team of Tom and Ellen Zappala, you can own a high-grade, 1952 Topps baseball card set for $35.

Well, sort of.

The Zappalas have put the iconic baseball card set into book form in a colorful, coffee table-sized format that includes photographs of all 407 cards and interesting sidebars. That includes the first Topps card of Mickey Mantle, one of the most coveted cards of the post-World War II era.

In Baseball & Bubble Gum:  The 1952 Topps Collection (Peter E. Randall Publisher; hardback; $35; 236 pages), the Zappalas, with assists from Collectors Universe President and CEO Joe Orlando, sports columnist John Molori and Collectors Universe photographer Christina Good, have put together a book of memories that should resonate with older collectors and give new collectors a different perspective.
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The book can be ordered through Amazon.com.  

​There have been books that have shown individual photographs of the entire 1952 Topps set — Frank Slocum’s 1994 effort, Baseball Cards of the Fifties, comes to mind (I guess that means I have two pristine 1952 Topps sets now, in addition to the ragged condition, uncompleted real-life set I own) — but Baseball & Bubble Gum offers more. Call it a more sentimental look, almost as if it were seen through the eyes of a 1950s kid collecting cards.

That is not a surprise, because the Zappalas have already published books about other iconic card sets, The T206 Collection: The Players & Their Stories, The Cracker Jack Collection: Baseball’s Prized Players, An All-Star’s Cardboard Memories, The 100 Greatest Baseball Autographs, and Legendary Lumber: The Top 100 Player Bats in Baseball History.

The ’52 set, as Orlando writes in the book’s foreword, “changed the game” and “ushered in a completely new era of collecting.”

Tom Zappala, born in 1952, grew up in the Boston area and began collecting baseball cards in the late 1950s. While he never collected the 1952 Topps set as a child, he had a respectable collection of cards from 1959 to 1966.

That is until his mother tossed them.

“I think mothers across the country must have attended a card trashing convention and voted unanimously to throw out the baseball cards in every home in America,” Tom Zappala writes.

I’d have to agree.

Zappala is an enthusiastic guy whose passion for card collecting comes through on “The Great American Collectibles Show,” a national weekly radio show he co-hosts with former Red Sox shortstop Rico Petrocelli.
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In Baseball & Bubble Gum, Tom and Ellen Zappala have broken down their book into four, distinct chapters: The Hall of Famers, The Uncommons, The Commons and A New Era Begins. All are self-explanatory, and the cards are presented in alphabetical, rather than numerical, order.

​That means the 26 players in the Hall of Fame chapter begin with Richie Ashburn and end with Early Wynn. The Uncommons are players who were very good but did not make it to Cooperstown (Joe Adcock to Gus Zernial) and the Commons include the rest of the set, from Cal Abrams to George Zuverink).
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The cards, photographed by Good, come from the graded collection of John Branca, which is rated No. 4 in the PSA registry. Branca is the nephew of Brooklyn Dodgers pitcher Ralph Branca, who probably couldn’t wait for the 1952 baseball season to begin. Ralph Branca had given up the “Shot Heard ’Round the World” to Bobby Thomson the previous October at the Polo Grounds, giving the New York Giants the 1951 National League pennant.

John Branca has a PSA 9 graded card of his uncle, by the way. He also has a PSA 8.5 of Mantle, which is card No. 311. John Branca also has six PSA 10 cards in this collection, including Hall of Famers such as Pee Wee Reese, Bob Lemon and Hoyt Wilhelm.

In the book, each card is featured with a photograph and a short biography, with Molori contributing to the research and narrative for every player. Each player listing also includes a box that lists the player’s notable career statistics, and there is a listing of the teams he played for and when he played for them.

Readers will find out which player was a prisoner of war during World War II (Mickey Grasso), the player whose grandson, Rick Porcello, won the Cy Young Award in 2016 (Sam Dente), the infielder who scored the first major league run for the Baltimore Orioles (Bobby Young), and the player who became a sheriff in Texas after his baseball career ended (Ray Murray).

Topps was always noted for interesting facts on the backs of their baseball cards, but Baseball & Bubble Gum takes it a step further. Baseball trivia nuts will rejoice.

“This book was certainly a labor of love for us because this wonderful collection brought back memories of our childhood,” Tom Zappala told Sports Collectors Daily last month. “Unlike the T206 collection and Cracker Jack collection, the 1952 Topps set was part of the fabric of our youth. That is what made writing the book so appealing.”

Orlando returns in the final chapter to break down the major elements of the 1952 set, from its composition and design to its place in pop culture. He writes about the bookend cards in the set: Andy Pafko, whose card No. 1 is graded PSA 8 in John Branca’s collection; and Hall of Famer Eddie Mathews, whose card landed a PSA 8.5 grade in the same collection. Orlando writes that the card was featured in the 2010 movie, Cop Out, which starred Bruce Willis and Tracy Morgan.

Orlando also delves into the never-ending appeal behind the Mantle card, noting that “no single card elicits more emotion from an entire generation of children.”

Also included in the book is the story of Sy Berger, the driving force behind the 1952 set. Berger had the vision to pit Topps against rival Bowman in the 1950s, a war Topps eventually won after the 1955 sets for both companies were released. Of course, the venerable story about Berger hiring a barge to dump a huge pallet of cards off the New York City coast in 1960 is included. Berger’s son adds a sentimental tribute to his father in the book.

The book also goes through the many variations and errors in the 1952 set, which was broken down into six series. Addressed are the card back errors of Johnny Sain and Joe Page, the different colored Tigers logos for Detroit catcher Frank House, and the overprinting of a star on the back of Washington Senators outfielder Frank Campos. Also discussed are the minor imperfections about the Mantle card, which readers should find fascinating.

And finally, there is a note about the players who never made it to the 1952 Topps set, although their inclusion would have made an already valuable set even more expensive. The Hall of Famers were Whitey Ford, Stan Musial and Ted Williams, and collectors can only sit back and wonder what might have been.

The wonderful thing about Baseball & Bubble Gum is that the reader can open the book to any page and be informed and entertained. If you love baseball cards, or just baseball history in general, this book is a keeper. It’s informative, sentimental and simply a blast to read.

Tom Zappala notes that he finally forgave his mother for throwing out his cards when he was a kid. In a response typical of Italian-American parents, Zappala’s mom “looked at me like I had two heads.”

“Forgive me for throwing out those worthless pieces of cardboard?” she said, as her son looked at her and smiled.
Bless you, Mrs. Z.

Here is a story I wrote for Sports Collectors Daily about a mint Michael Jordan rookie card that is coming up for auction next month. The card is owned by Tim Gallagher, an autograph collector with more than 50 years of experience chasing down signatures. His stories are fantastic:
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www.sportscollectorsdaily.com/mint-autographed-jordan-rookie-card-set-for-auction-just-part-of-collectors-long-signature-seeking-journey/