Heritagescaping

The other day I received my Dodgers from Crackin' Wax's two-box Heritage break. I was lucky enough to land the Dodgers for both boxes, which means I pretty much can stop buying 2013 Heritage for the rest of infinity.

Here is most of my haul:

It's actually a good thing that I did buy a couple of rack packs before this break because somehow Crackin' Wax didn't pull a Don Mattingly card out of two boxes, yet I got one out of a rack pack.

But I am very, very pleased to be done with pursuing short-print cards of Andre Ethier, Adrian Gonzalez and Matt Kemp. As I've groaned about before, there are four Dodger SPs in Heritage this year. Now, all I have left to chase is Hanley Ramirez.

There are probably some stupid inserts and parallels, too, but we're not talking about that now.

What I want to talk about is what appears to be Heritage's obsession with eyes in this set.

Or it could be my obsession with eyes, but you can be the judge of that.

I first noticed it with the Brandon League card:

Doesn't there seem to be something funky going on with the eyes? Like he's wearing eyeliner?

At first I just dismissed this as Brandon League being Brandon League. He's one of those modern players preoccupied with self-grooming. Tattoos everywhere. Over-thought hair. Manscaping to a disturbing degree.

But then I saw the same eyelining effect on my favorite player.

You have to look a little closer, but doesn't it look like Topps outlined Kershaw's eyes in black?

OK, this was getting too weird.

This is my favorite player here. And you're reading a guy who is still not quite over the whole Boy George-Motley Crue-Poison era.

But the card that really caused me to sit down and think was this one:

I'm not sure what this is supposed to be. If Topps always wondered what Josh Beckett would look like as Catwoman, then mission accomplished.

I've noticed the eye thing on other Heritage cards, although not to the degree of the Beckett card.

Not only has Topps tinkered with Norris' cap, but it looks like it pulled out the mascara pen, and dilated Norris' pupils, too.

I'm not sure what this all means. I don't think it's some sort of weird tribute to 1964 Topps. And I don't think a lot of ballplayers are wearing mascara these days. I think it's probably that Topps was overcompensating for cap shadows and this is the result.

It's not manscaping. It's Heritagescaping.

We all know how Topps loves to tinker.