Mets COTW: 1996 Topps Finest Jason Isringhausen

I really dig the 1990s Topps Finest offerings but it would have been illuminating to have been in the meetings that led to the creation of the 1996 Finest set.

Topps – Okay, we’re going to have 359 cards and we’re going to release them in two series. The first one’s going to have 191 cards and the second will have 168.
Me: All of those numbers just seem weird. Why not 400 cards in two sets of 200?

Topps – Oh, and we’re going to divide up the cards into different subsets, which will be labeled on the front. We’ll have Phenoms, Intimidators, Gamers and Sterling.
Me: Well, Phenoms makes sense, with all of the people interested in rookie cards. Not sure about the others.
Topps – And in series two, we’ll have these four subsets – Franchise, Additions, Prodigies, and Sterling.
Me: Um, why?

Topps – And both series will have built-in scarcity. The regular cards will have bronze borders, the tougher cards will have a silver border and the really rare ones will have gold borders. And we’ll name one of them pretentiously, calling the silver ones uncommon.
Me: You’ll sell more cards with having the silver and gold ones being in the base set of 359. But, uncommon, really?

Topps – Because we know fans will want to collect just one of the subsets, we’ll include numbers for the subset but we won’t do it sequentially. So, the cards will have two numbers – the first one where they are in the overall 359 cards and the second one in where they are in the subset. It won’t be confusing at all.
Me: Yeah, right.

Topps – People love the refractors that we introduced, so we’ll have a really, really scarce insert of refractors for all of the cards. We’ll tell everyone how few of the refractors there really are to drive demand. But we’ll make more than what we tell them.
Me: Allegedly, there were 150 refractors of the gold cards in series one. But a collector gathered 220 gold refractor Greg Maddux cards, paying an average of $900 per card. The collector sued Topps and settled out of court. A similar issue happened with Topps Finest hockey cards, where a different collector amassed 159 Jaromir Jagr gold refractors. That collector spent $54,000 and filed suit. He was awarded $177,000.

*****

In a way, this 1996 Topps Finest set is like the 1972 Topps set, the one that broke the set-length record with 787 cards. The ’72 set pulled out all of the stops and so did the 1996 Finest set. My opinion is that they did it better in ’72 but it was a much-more competitive market in ’96 and Topps did what it thought it had to do to compete.

Anyway, to look at the specific Jason Isringhausen gold card – there were 48 gold cards in the 359-card set. At the time, there were 28 teams in MLB, meaning that each team should get 1-2 gold cards. For the most part, this set had the best players get gold cards – Maddux, Ken Griffey Jr., Frank Thomas and Randy Johnson all got gold cards. There were a couple of rookie/young guys who got gold cards, too.

Isringhausen made his debut in 1995 and as a 22 year old, he went 9-2 with a 2.81 ERA and finished fourth in the Rookie of the Year balloting, even though he didn’t debut until July 17. It’s not a big surprise he was given a gold card. And he turned out to have a terrific MLB career, even if the great majority of it came for other teams and as a reliever.

The Mets were one of the teams with multiple gold cards and the other player to get one was also another youngster, one who would make his MLB debut in 1996. Joining Isringhausen was Rey Ordonez. Guess Topps went 1-2 with their gold card choices for the Mets in their 1996 set.