Cubs 2010 Topps Factory Team Set

Jay Bee has written several times about his collection of Topps Factory Team sets. The few stores around here that carry baseball cards have never had any of the team sets, so they were never really on my radar.

But after his latest post on the sets, I thought I'd look into them a little further. I found I could get all of the sets from 2006 to 2010 pretty easily. So I decided to buy them.

Today I'll take a closer look at this year's set. There are 17 cards in the set, which is more than these usually have. Typically there have been 14 cards per team.

Of the 17 in the Cubs set, nine players were not featured in the base set's series one. So that makes those cards new to me. I'm assuming I'll see all of these again when series two comes out. And then there was one card, Derrek Lee's, that used a different picture that the one in series one. I wonder why Topps switched the picture, and why only one player? Seems a little odd to me.

First up are the nine missing from series one. There are some pretty big names here, too.



Marlon Byrd



Mike Fontenot



Kosuke Fukudome



Carlos Marmol



Aramis Ramirez



Alfonso Soriano



Geovany Soto



Randy Wells, plus a free commercial for Gatorade



And our most recent addition to the bullpen, Carlos Zambrano

And now, here are the two Derrek Lee cards side by side. The one on the left is from the base set, the one on the right from the factory set. Again, I wonder why the switch?



It's interesting how similar the pictures look, even though they were taken at two different stadiums. I guess Lee's swing is pretty consistent.

I've got the 2006, 2007, and 2008 sets in hand, and I'll get to those within the next week.