I again bought hobby boxes to work on my collection for 2001 Topps. I think the HTA jumbo boxes have better odds for a big hit, and you can actually get a few cards from retail packs that you can’t find in hobby or HTA packs. That’s series 2 – where the Hit Parade Relics are only in retail. At 1:2,607, I didn’t go for that. And the hobby boxes were quite a bit cheaper than the HTA boxes, so that’s what I opened for this year’s set.
I actually bought these boxes back in 2012, and it’s just taken me this long to catch up to 2001! When I opened this one, I was disappointed by the amount of damaged cards. The cards were really stuck together – pretty much every pack had some kind of issue with being stuck together. I had about 50 damaged cards, 46 of which were singles that I will have as open cards for my Topps project. I think the gloss on the 2001 cards have a lot more gloss than previous Topps cards, and I’m sure that contributes to this issue. I was careful when opening it, and honestly, series 1 wasn’t all that bad. Series 2 was far worse.
The box collation was pretty good, but not perfect – I got 335 of the 405 cards in the series. That mean I had 9 doubles. Not too bad – except when you add in the 46 damaged singles. So I’m ultimately 116 cards short of the series.
There was no oversized box topper in 2001, and there aren’t SP cards in the 2001 base set. So I’ll start with the parallel set. There’s only 1 parallel set available in packs in 2001. Topps basically brought back Topps Gold after it had existed from 1992 through 1994. In those years, Topps Gold added gold foil to the player name on the front. This version added gold foil to the border with a diagonal design. They make for a pretty nice card.
Next I’ll show off the “regular” inserts. After 5 years of doing full runs of Hall-of-Famer reprints, (Mantle, Mays, Clemente, Ryan, Aaron), Topps did still to some “throwback” inserts in 2001. Series 1 had an insert called “Through the Years”. This is an insert set of 50 cards, from the past 49 years of Topps cards. Unfortunately (at least unfortunately in my opinion), there isn’t 1 of each year shown – so you have some sets with 2 cards and some not represented. Not how I’d have done it – but it’s still a very good insert at the time. I pulled 4 of these, which is basically what you should expect at 1:8 odds.
The McCovey is my favorite here – this Topps All-Star Rookie card is pretty significant. McCovey was the first Topps ASR winner to make the Hall of Fame! However, some of this is pretty silly. That Musial card is from 59, and the Spahn is from 57. So why do I have them out of chronological order? Because Topps put them in numerical order that way!
My favorite insert set from 2001 Topps is the Topps Combos insert set. This was not a new one – Topps did the same thing the year before. But the combinations were great!
The other insert set you could get in series 1 was called Golden Anniversary. There were subsets to this insert set, as you can see. I pulled Glistening Gold, Hidden Gold, and Going for Gold. The others are Golden Greats and Golden Nuggets. This was one of the first insert sets Topps did that had both retired and current players included. A trend I don’t like, but frankly was appropriate here because it was done for the 50th anniversary.
The other 2 insert sets were what I call filler – they were “A Look Ahead”, which was basically like future stars. And “A Tradition Continues”, which were similar cards for current stars.
The last card I pulled was a huge hit! Well, it was a rare pull; but if this was a 1991 Topps pack, I’d be disappointed!
Nothing against Rob Ducey. He played 703 games over 13 season, which showed great resiliency! But this was literally a super-duper hit! The odds were 1:911, so it was pretty much a pull for 1 of every 25 boxes, yet it was a card you couldn’t give away! The Topps buyback was a good idea in 2001 – but what they did in 2011 to promote 60 years was better.
As always, the numbers below don’t factor in the damaged cards – I’m tracking this to know what it would have been if I had bought the cards in 2001, and I assume they wouldn’t have been stuck together back then.
**********
Stats for the box:
36 packs per box * 10 cards per pack + 1 extra (Topps History) = 361 cards
9 doubles
335 of the 405 card series. (83% set completion)
2 Topps Gold 50th parallels
1 History (Vintage Original)
4 Through the Years
3 Combos
3 Golden Anniversary
2 Tradition Continues
2 A Look Ahead
Lifetime Topps project 
Leave a comment