It is with great sadness that I’m saying goodbye to the man who became my friend and most trusted baseball card trader. I never met Mike Augusto in person; there were three-thousand miles between us. I didn’t know what he did for a living, where he stood politically, if he was a man of faith or if he had a family. Our friendship existed in a place that made those details irrelevant. We were baseball fans in general and baseball card buddies in particular, comrades in the colorful world of cardboard magic. We met on Facebook and over the years formed a friendship that went deep and included humor, a commitment to fairness, honesty and respect. We cheered for each other’s teams. I was happy for Mike every time his Red Sox won championships, and when my Mets somehow blundered into the 2015 World Series, he pulled for me. Read more →
Major League Baseball has for many years awarded Topps a monopoly to print baseball cards with a team’s logo and name.
So where does that leave the other guys?
In my opinion, in a bad place.
If other companies want to issue baseball cards, they may not show the logo on the cap or the team’s name and city on the jersey. For me, this makes for a very unsatisfying product. Read more →
