2012 TOPPS HERITAGE MINT DUKE SNIDER
This one’s a bit of a mindbleep.
It’s a 2012 Topps Heritage Mint card that pays tribute to Duke Snider‘s 400th career home run, and it contains an uncirculated 1963 quarter embedded in a small round window to the right of a photo of the kneeling Silver Fox.
Duke hit this milestone homer as a member of the Mets on June 14, 1963. At the time, he became the 9th player with 400 career bombs– as of today, there are now 49 such players, with David Ortiz and Adam Dunn sure to push the total past 50 later this year…
Topps produced a series of 20 of these Mint cards for the 2012 Heritage set (with denominations ranging from a penny up to a half dollar), and inserted them one per case.
Each denomination is keyed to a specific type of 1963 event. For example, the penny cards commemorate players who were born in the year of the Beatles and JFK (Edgar Martinez, Paul O’Neill), while these quarter cards cover 1963 player milestones.
This Snider card is beef-patty thick. It was too substantial to hide in a pack, so Topps replaced it with a regular-sized redemption card that included a scratch-off code. I entered the code online, and 6-8 weeks later this absurd Duke showed up at my door in a small padded envelope…
I think this is a pretty good idea for an insert series. This Snider card is very cool, although I hate the landscape orientation. Even the quarter wants to be part of a portrait card.
I’m anal enough to be frustrated by the fact that I can’t re-orient the damn quarter…