70 years of topps and 50 years of steve garvey, or is it 71 and 51?

i am a little annoyed with the way topps numbers things. not cards themselves, at least not as part of this rant, but rather the "70 years of baseball" theme that has been a big part of their 2021 flagship release. back in 1991, topps added "40 years of baseball" to their logo, and in 2001 it was "50 years". gold parallel cards beginning in 2002 noted "xx years of collecting" - and that year it was "51". then in 2011, topps had an insert set called "60 years of topps" similar to this year's "70 years of topps", except they used reprints of actual cards. back then. strangely, they ignored 1951 and so the insert set in series 1 just had 59 cards. at the time. prior to this, i assumed that they were celebrating anniversarys, but with that set it seemed as though they were ignoring their 1951 set and were considering the 2011 set to be their 60th year's issue rather than the 61st set that they produced. 

it didn't make sense to me that topps would ignore 1951 and i finally had some clarity when, in 2016, they issued buybacks in flagship with a "65th anniversary" logo. that made it clear to me that they do in fact consider '51 to be their inaugural year for baseball cards (and rightfully so). as a result, i have come to accept that when topps says "xx years of baseball" or "xx years of collecting", they are really saying that it's their xxth anniversary. just like someone might say they are celebrating 50 years of marriage during the year in which their 50th anniversary occurs.

that still doesn't explain the situation that is made worse because of heritage, as the decision to start with the 1952 design in 2001 seems to confuse people at topps. i believe it was in 2008 (when the 1959 set design was used), that topps started issuing "50th anniversary" buybacks, even though it was really only the 49th anniversary of the set. that practice has continued even as the recent flagship sets celebrate the 35th anniversary of designs that are 14 years separated from the heritage designs. for example, in 2020 heritage featured the 1971 set design with "50th" anniversary buybacks while flagship had 30th anniversary cards of the 1985 design. you can't have it both ways, topps.

this year, however, things are a bit more clear. i can give topps credit for the "70 years of baseball" insert set that features cards with new photos on old designs that starts with 1951 (mookie betts) and ends with 2020 (hank aaron) - that's 70 years of baseball! and, according to their checklist, the manufactured relics feature the "70th anniversary logo" which also fits with the current year. of course, this would be less confusing if only topps had added a "th" to the 70 in the logo itself.

enough ranting and text!  i picked up a couple of the steve garvey "70 years of baseball" autograph cards for my player collection - here's the base version

and here's the black version.

it's numbered to 50, even though the official checklist says that the black version is numbered to 199. here's the gold version numbered to 25, 

but the official checklist says that it should be numbered to 50. a red version also supposedly exists that is numbered to 10 (based on other subjects i've seen on ebay), but the checklist says that red parallels are 25 in number.  there's a 1/1 that i assume is correctly identified as "platinum" on the checklist.  i wound up deleting the /199 version from my garvey checklist and updating the numbers accordingly, and i'll leave it that way until i actually see a card from this set numbered to 199. 

garvey first appeared in a topps set in 1971, so this is the 51st year that he has had cards issued (although topps has missed a few of those years), and the 50th anniversary of his first cardboard appearance, just as it is the 71st year that topps has issued cards and the 70th anniversary of their first set. regardless, i am celebrating seeing him back in the topps fold.