Your weekly reminder that Topps doesn’t care

I didn’t realize until a few days ago that Topps had released its Archives brand.

I don’t know how anyone keeps track. The archive’s arrival is a week, maybe two, after Allen and Ginter’s arrival. And that came shortly after Topps Holiday debuted, which seemed to be released pretty much on top of Topps Update.

All of this came after months of almost no new releases at all – or none that the average plebe collector (that’s me!) would notice.

This doesn’t seem very consumer friendly. I can’t focus on four new products coming together around the holidays if my money is tied up finding gifts for others. But I’m sure Topps/Fanatics wouldn’t care. This release schedule is probably the best way to ‘maximize profits’, which seems to be the only goal in business these days.

So no, I haven’t had time to buy any archives. And no Allen & Ginter either. I decided to pass on Holiday and I secured Update with one purchase of the Dodgers team set. This means I needed the interwebs to show me this:

As Charlie Brown would say in “A Charlie Brown Christmas”: I can’t stand it.

Here, Carl Yastrzemski’s 2025 archive card is misspelled… twice. YASTZRESMKI is not his name.

We just discussed this with Archives last year (well, earlier this year), when the 2024 set spelled out poor Carl’s name in the same way.

I don’t even know how they came up with that combination of letters. It takes all the concentration I can muster to spell it like that – wrong. But apparently the people who work on Archives think that’s how it’s spelled, because here it is, spelled exactly the same incorrect way for the second year in a row.

It’s baffling that someone didn’t bother to double check the name by doing a simple online search. It’s clear that people there aren’t that familiar with the player. Wouldn’t you do that just to be sure? He has 11 letters in his last name!

Get the name right, Topps!

See, here’s part of the article with both the Mike Yastrzemski and Carl Yastrzemski errors pictured. The spelling errors are different on each card.🤦:

No, I don’t expect a blog post or magazine article to impact an industry in the same way it used to. I’m sure no one at Topps has read these things. And that’s part of the problem.

Topps cares so little about the things traditional collectors care about that it doesn’t bother to get the details right – even details about a Hall of Fame player who the company once had no problem spelling throughout his career. In my article above, I quote a quote from Mike Yastrzemski when Topps misspelled his name in 2022. Mike said: “I actually thought it was really funny.” I wonder if it’s still funny the second and then the third time.

Topps, I mean, Fanatics, cares about some things. These are breakers and flippers. It cares about what they think and what they want and how much money they have. Apparently there is no room for anything else, not for the collectors who have put 40, 50, 60 years into this hobby and mostly with Topps.

Maybe I’m wrong about that. But how can I think otherwise? As someone who has spelled Yastrzemski’s name phonetically in my head (Yast-r-zemski) since I was a child trying to write it down correctly, that’s all I can conclude. Misspelling a player’s name over and over again is sloppy, which is an indication that you don’t care, at least where I come from.

And that’s why I didn’t actually buy Archives. Or Allen & Ginter. Or vacation. Or update.

Because Topps/Fanatics doesn’t care about me.