Imagine you are systematically working your way through a brand-new box of 2010 Topps Heritage Baseball (I picked Heritage because that’s a product I can actually imagine myself opening), and just as you get to the bottom of the box, there’s a pack of a different color, so to speak.

   There, surrounded by the last two packs of 2010 Heritage, is a pack that looks nothing like the others, and has a vintage look and feel and bright red-and-yellow graphic design, but for some reason it’s somewhat smaller than the other packs. That’s because it is a pristine wax pack of 1975 Topps Baseball Minis!

   How cool would that be? I have been one of those hobbyists largely left behind in the craze that has defined contrived scarcity, but I would think that opening a box of cards with the potential – however remote – of finding a 35-year-old unopened pack inside would be a great sales gimmick.

   I’ve never been shy about offering suggestions to Topps over the years, and though they’ve ignored most of them, I don’t lose faith. So all Topps has to do is buy maybe two of the cases – which admittedly won’t be chump change – and according to my calculations that would give them nearly 1,200 packs to insert.

   Oh, I’ll be the first to concede there are probably lots of aspects to this that I don’t fully comprehend, but that kind of ignorance has never stopped me from spouting off before.

   Besides, I wanted to be known as the guy who invented the “insert pack.”