The Art of Choosing the Perfect Image for Topps Stadium Club

Selecting the right images for Stadium Club comes with a lot of pressure, especially for a lifelong collector, to get it right.

Nov 08, 2024

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Stadium Club is a product where the images are the biggest stars.

It’s filled with dynamic pictures you don’t typically see on cards.

In the five years that I worked at Topps, I chose the images for Stadium Club from 2015 to 2017 — and it was one of my favorite things I ever got to do.

Selecting the right images for Stadium Club, which was released this week, comes with a lot of pressure, especially for a lifelong collector, to get it right.

Sure, autographs are nice and collectors love big hits, but those things don’t matter so much if the image sucks.

I spent hours combing Getty Images looking for the right picture for each player.

Sometimes the right image came quickly. Other times it took going through dozens of pages of images until I found one that spoke to me.

That was always the key. I needed to feel something when looking at the image.

There were certain types of images I liked best: showing joy, celebrations, beautiful cityscapes, close-ups, pitchers in motion, non-baseball actions and posed photography.

One of my favorite cards was 2015’s Jose Fernandez. That smile. That joy. Everything about the way he watched the game made me happy.

After his tragic death, that image came to represent a reminder of his joyful spirit.

Retired and old-time players were a little different. There aren’t hundreds or thousands of images on Getty of guys like Babe Ruth or Ted Williams. The key was to find something original or different.

Like this Lou Gehrig card from 2015, which shows him jumping over a bat being held by ... surprise, Joe DiMaggio. Sometimes, a crop doesn't work well with the card design. You either pick a new image or find a way to make it work. This card was too much fun to let it go. You can see the full image on Getty here.

One of the selling points of Stadium Club was the use of pictures that had never appeared on a Topps card before on a full-bleed design.

Collectors often wonder why images get re-used, and one big reason is because it’s more expensive to use new images every time.

Each product has an image budget and the brand team has to keep within that budget. There's a fee for using an image from Getty, and reusing an image is significantly cheaper than buying a new image.

Retouching images is another cost. For years, Topps outsourced the designs and graphics for cards to another company (everything has since come in-house).

Because Stadium’s Club's selling point was the beautiful card imagery, new images were preferred. These usually happened for products like SC or Topps flagship, Bowman and a few others.

Sometimes, I couldn’t help but use an image that was already on a card.

That was the case with Anthony Rizzo’s 2017 Stadium Club card. During the 2016 season, he made an acrobatic play where he stood on top of a wall, leaned over into the stands and caught a foul ball.

If you saw that play, you know exactly what I’m talking about. It was a memorable moment that was featured on a Topps Now card. How could that not make it into Stadium Club?

Through all of the hundreds of images I picked, there’s one that will always be my favorite. It wasn’t the prettiest picture. It didn’t show a lot of “action.” But it was a special moment as my favorite player headed for retirement.

Derek Jeter’s 2015 card features him running onto the field at Yankee Stadium for the very last time. Fans are cheering for The Captain, his teammates are all on the top step, and all the while, it looks as though Jeter has a little sadness in his eyes.

He still had one more iconic moment left in that game that was on other Topps cards, but this was the way to cap his career with one final jog.

Here’s a few more of my favorite Stadium Club cards from the years I selected images.