Tim Wallach: 2024 Topps Archives Fan Favorites Auto #95FF-TW

Friday, January 31, 2025

2024 Topps Archives Fan Favorites Auto #95FF-TW

Card Review: 9.3 This is the first "new" Tim Wallach card Topps has put out since the 2019 Archives set, which included Wallach in the "Montreal Expos 50th" subset. This card is done in the style of a 1995 Topps, and I'd call it a significant improvement over the original, which wasn't bad to begin with. It's really a very nice looking card. The vintage Expos baby blues work really well with this design (but they look so good they work well with just about any design). By 1995 the Expos had stopped wearing these uniforms in favor of the bland grey script jerseys on the road, and Wallach was in his third year with the Dodgers regardless.

The front photo of this card is as nice as any Topps ever put on a Wallach card. While I can't prove it, I'll go ahead and say with an enormous degree of conifidence that this photo was taken during the same game, if not same at-bat, as the photo used on Wallach's 1990 Topps card (more photos below for comparison). At some point I may get around to photo shopping this photo onto the 1990 card. The primary back photo looks very familiar, but I couldn't place it to a card. A quick google search shows it to be a Getty Image from 1988.

My nitpicks, to the extent that I have any, are two fold. The first is the autograph. I know I'm fighting not just a losing battle, but a full on lost cause here, but I can't stand autographs on cards. Ten year old kids getting a card autographed by a player at the ball park is great, I can name every player that ever signed for my brother and I as a kid. But cards out of the pack shouldn't have sharpie or pen marks on them. They're just a blemish, and the wrong kind of blemish (as in not a wax or gum stain, which of course are fine). My second tiny complaint is with the tiny action photo on the back. We've seen it before. It's the photo used by Topps for Wallach's 2017 Archives card. The guy played 13 seasons in Montreal, there's enough photographic evidence of it that Topps doesn't need to double up.

All in all, I am very pleased with the release of this card, and will make an effort to track down a sample of each of the two or three dozen variations that Topps probably made of it, so long as the prices aren't too insane. So far I've seen four different colored and numbered variations, but I suspect there are more. I'll update when I learn something definitive.

Number of this card in my collection: 2

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