My Project70 postal saga

I don't seem to have a huge amount of luck with the post. Back in November last year I had the saga where Royal Mail charged me a customs fee and then delivered the parcel to the wrong house. I've also had cards occasionally arrive with dinged corners, although that's a packaging issue more than anything else. 

The saga over the past month has set a new low in terms of waiting for parcels that just seem to never come. I ordered two Topps Project70 cards via Dugout Classics and got the shipping notice about them on 26 April. I had hoped to have them in time to blog on my one year blog anniversary, but they seemed to disappear.

After several long conversations with Jason who runs Dugout Classics, we finally decided on Monday - which was 4 weeks after the cards had shipped - to call it a bust. Jason refunded my money and I felt disappointed, but okay about it. I figured the cards would tip up on the secondary market eventually. I even joked with Jason that we were tempting fate by doing the refund and now the universe was bound to find the cards for me.

Tuesday morning the postman put a form through the letterbox saying I needed to collect something from the main sorting office. Was this the missing Project70 cards? Was it something else entirely? I couldn't find out because they have restricted opening times at the moment, so I had to wait until Wednesday to go and pick the parcel up.

So, yesterday, the 26 May, one entire calendar month since the shipping notice, my wife went to the sorting office on my behalf and came back with a padded envelope with the Project70 cards in!

Huzzah!

(And yes, that is a thank you sticker on the back of a Fleer base card of Tony from 1989. I have several already - here's where I blogged about it just over a year ago.)

Card Number 678: Topps Project70, 2021; #51

I really like this card because it looks very different, designed to look like a fabric patch. Mimsbandz were embroidered designs produced for and worn by many players in the 1980s as a drugs awareness programme. 

I think almost all the player who wore Mimsbandz were black. Until recently Mimsbandz was the only black-owned company to have a contract with Major League Baseball, but that contract lapsed in 2020 and there are no black-owned companies linked to MLB. (Hat tip to Jason who found this out while researching about the Negro Leagues. recently.)

Tony wore Mimsbandz during his career and they are quite prominent on a couple of his cards, including this Topps Archives card from 2003:

Here's a close up of the patch.

The bands were also prominent on the Topps Super 70s Sports card released in 2020.

The back of the Project70 card has a bit more information about Mimsbandz. The repeating Topps logo are actually holograms.

Trading Card Database lists this card's print run as 2,713. Due to the huge postal delay, it wouldn't surprise me to find out that I was the 2,713th person to receive their card. (But I was the first person to upload a picture to TCDb!)

Total: 678 cards