By Walt Hickey Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition. This week, I spoke to Eben Novy-Williams, who wrote “Fanatics to Buy Topps in $500M Deal as Trading Card Biz Zooms into 2022” for Sportico. Here's what I wrote about it: Fanatics, the largest seller of licensed sports apparel in the world, last year made a daring play to scoop up the long-term exclusive rights to baseball cards out from under longtime trading card producer Topps. It worked, and a plan to take Topps public through a special purpose acquisition company at a valuation of around $1.6 billion was scuttled, and the entire trading card business was swiftly reshuffled. Now, Fanatics has reached a deal to buy the Topps trading card business for