Before The Challenge, You Had To Dig

A few days ago I blogged about the Home Run Challenge cards. I noted that it was an interesting concept where card distribution was based on luck rather than how big your wallets were. Originally that post was also supposed to include another online giveaway that was sorta based on chance, but I decided to separate that into this post.

Back in 2011, Topps went pretty hard with its 60th anniversary celebration. Especially on the online front in the form of codes you could input to "dig up" cards, virtual rings and various other prizes. If memory serves, the virtual rings (once you collected all 45 rings) helped you get free shipping on the cards you wanted shipped to you straight from Topps.

As far as the cards themselves went, you'd usually ended up with run of the mill base cards and inserts. Every now and then you'd run into vintage cards from the 60's and 70's (Night Owl even pulled a '52 Saul Rogovin!) but it was better to expect nothing. For a somewhat good idea of what you could've expected, here's a post from Ryan of This Card Is Cool and one from Play At The Plate, both illustrating what a few codes could get you.

Of course, if you were curious about the more interesting prizes, there were two (that I know of) online-exclusives. You might've been able to win these based on how lucky you were (or how many codes you bought).

The first, and the one lives up to the Diamond Giveaway billing, were the 1/1 Diamond embedded cards. These were thick pieces of cardboard that were 1/1's and featured a little Diamond in the place of where the baseball on the 2011 Topps design was supposed to go.

P-Town Tom lucked into a Nyjer Morgan version of this then later sold it.

One day I'd like to add one of these cards to my collection, but when the lowest price I can find on eBay is $400, that day isn't coming anytime soon.

Anyway these die-cuts were pretty hot commodities. Night Owl managed to turn a Roy Halladay (RIP) die-cut into two vintage 1954 Topps Brooklyn Dodgers, and three vintage 1955 Topps Brooklyn Dodgers. N.O. also mentions how they got swamped with trade requests for his Reggie Jackson die-cut. And that's just for the base die-cuts. Imagine how insane the requests for the serial numbered die-cuts must've been. And no, I can't remember the requests I got for the Maris since I ignored all of them.

Sidenote: For a fun little ride on how one flipped stuff they didn't want for a die-cut they did want, The Lost Collector turned a few cards into a (future Yankee) Brian McCann die-cut, then they traded it for a CC Sabathia die-cut, and though TLC wanted to flip it for a Nick Swisher or Mark Teixeira they got tired of the lowball offers and just had the CC shipped (took 10 days to arrive apparently). Though TLC never got the Swisher, they did get the Tex later.

Both the diamond-embedded 1/1 and the die-cut concept would be brought over into 2012 as part of the Golden Giveaway where you could win either a 1/1 1 karat gold embedded card, or a die-cut (that also had serial numbered variations and even a 1/1 gold embedded variant). Unfortunately the part where you could win any card from Topps' past didn't survive, leading many people to hold the opinion that the Golden Giveaway sucks. Which, yeah it totally did. There's a reason I'm writing a retrospective on the Diamond Giveaway and not the Golden Giveaway here in 2019.

One last note on the "less notable" cards you'd dig up during the Diamond Giveaway. I have to confess that it was through this promotion that I got my hands on what was once the "oldest card in my collection", and not just that but it was of somebody too.

Boom, an insert of Rollie Fingers from 1982 Topps. Not vintage, not even that rare, and I'm 99.9% sure I've thumbed through another copy of this at a dime box or even a nickel box at a card show at some point. But back in 2011/12 when I was still new to the hobby (and baseball in general), this seemed like the coolest thing ever to me. An old card from when a HoF player was still active. I wanted it. This was the other card that was part of my first trade with Ryan.

If I ever have a chance to get a reasonably priced IP auto of Rollie Fingers, you can bet that it'll be on this one. Through all of the weird twists and turns my collection took in order to get to where it is now, it's survived all of it. It'll continue to survive despite being worth less than the virtual dirt I dug it up from.

So there was a trip down memory lane for those of you who were around in 2011. For many of you it was just something that happened eight (YES, EIGHT!) years ago. For me it was part of a very fun first year in the hobby. It all seemed so new, fresh and exciting. Even though those feelings have long since eroded, I do still look back fondly on what happened back then. Though I often curse at myself for the bad purchases I made in the time between 2013-2017 when I had zero clue what I wanted to do collection-wise.

As always thanks for stopping by and take care :).