Trial run

 

I suppose it seems dismissive to consider finishing the 2023 Topps Heritage set a "trial run," because completing any Heritage set is no easy achievement.

But as I was in the middle of trying to complete it, I realized that this was an excellent test for whether I could really finish the upcoming 2024 Heritage set (1975 Topps design), which has been my Heritage goal since I had a full idea of what Heritage was.

The only Heritage set I had finished prior was the 2008 set (1959 design) and that took me more than a decade. I didn't want to go through that again.

 

But I didn't. The final card to complete 2023 Heritage arrived Friday.

 

That is card No. 498, one of the ONE HUNDRED short-prints in the set. The rookie prospects cards are the final cards in the set. These four have played a combined 37 games in the majors.

 

I very nearly ignored adding the card because I already had this card:

 

One of those big-box parallel exclusives. How long could my brain survive staring at this card amid all the other white-bordered Heritage cards before jumping out of my head and pressing ship on the keyboard its own damn self?

Obviously I had to get the regular card. Then I spent much of Saturday's NFL games paging the set into a binder.

This is how it all began.

As you know, there are freak-outs along the way while paging, suddenly you can't find this card or that card. Most of the time it's a simple matter of realizing you skipped over the number in the stack. But then there are the gremlins that promote panic.

I encountered only one though. It was card No. 156 of Twins outfielder Matt Wallner. I knew that gcrl had sent me a copy of the card and I also knew I had a double of it around the same time. I rushed to the Heritage dupes stacks and found exactly one Wallner. Phew!

Also, since this is a modern set, there was other confusion and alarms going off during the lead-up to completion.

Both of these cards are numbered 327. No reason. 1974 Topps didn't do that, it's just Topps isn't able to to handle producing a full set anymore. Too many irons.

There you go. Apparently Wong was supposed to be No. 100, but we'll get to that in a minute. ... Oh, don't look at the back if you remember collecting in '74. Just get a quick glance of the glorious retro green and then look away, stare too long and the forced justification will blind you. (Also, there is a whole bunch of Stat Cast stuff in the back. They read like scouting reports).

 

But the two 327s was why my Heritage checklist on TCDB kept saying I had 501 cards instead of 500. I kept looking at it and thinking "well, I'll have to figure that out at some point."

 

Finally this:

 

This is card No. 100 in the set. I never came across it in the several blasters and "giant boxes" that I bought. 

At some point while looking through ebay for the few SPs I still needed, a picture of this card slammed me in the face. What the F is this????? I naturally thought I was the one who screwed up and hadn't actually finished the base set as I had announced on this blog weeks ago (sorry, Garrett Mitchell, you weren't the last one).

But I was just being hard on myself again. Thanks to reading this blog post and a conversation I had with Junk Wax Jay several hours earlier, I learned that card No. 100 wasn't issued with the rest of the base set, it appears only in the Heritage High Numbers packs, apparently.

 

I don't know if this was intentional or a screw-up or an intentional screw-up (something similar happened with a card in 2021 Heritage) -- it's not like there are a bunch of people trying to complete Heritage on the blogs anymore like 12 years ago when you could share information. While in a full-blown panic, I quickly bought the card on ebay.

 

So, yeah, that's the kind of stuff that jumps up and bites you while trying to finish modern sets now. This is the first new set I've completed since 2015 (2021 and 2022 flagship doesn't count, I was gifted those). And now I know that I did need a trial run before trying to tackle 2024 Heritage.

 

That stuff aside, I'm overjoyed to have this set in a binder, one whose look matches so closely with the first cards I ever pulled out of packs, that I fell in love with, the first cards I shuffled through and stacked neatly inside a desk drawer. And the first card I ever threw in the garbage at the end of summer. Silly little me.

 

Pages like this are pretty cool. The World Series cards (all high numbers) were done fairly well, except that there are three Game 6 cards with different pictures but the same backs.

No, these aren't exactly like the 1974 Topps cards, Heritage isn't like that anymore (every time I see a rookie cup in this set I want to scream, and why are there two Pablo Lopez cards?). But Heritage had to do something right for me to want to dedicate most of my collecting year to finishing this set and being totally delighted when it was done.

 

It's just seeing those time-appropriate action photos and the familiar flags and borders in those familiar colors.

I picked up my first 2023 Heritage cards at the end of May and finished it at the start of January. It can be done.

I'm starting to think I'll have a little bit of time before I have to think about 2024 Heritage (no, I'm not buying a case). With the way releases have been pushed back, my guess is Heritage won't show up until May again this year.

 

Completing it is a bit of a time investment and there are so many other card quests that I'm afraid I won't get to because of chasing Heritage. But there's absolutely no way I can say "pass" to a set with the '75 design. 

I'd say finishing 2023 Heritage is in the top 20 of set-completion feats in my collecting history, maybe the top 15. We'll see what happens in 2024.

But first there's the matter of this:

Thoughts on Heritage High Numbers in the next post.