Not that difficult

 

I completed the 2024 Heritage set a week ago Tuesday.

It is amazing to me that I finished the set that quickly. I was showing off my hobby box of Heritage back in mid-April. They were the first of the set's cards I had acquired, and four months and a couple weeks later I had the set done.

 

That was even faster than the six-plus months that it took me to complete 2023 Heritage last year.

Is this the same guy who took more than a decade to finish 2008 Heritage?

 

It took me so long to finish '08 Heritage that I was convinced that it would take that long to complete any Heritage set and therefore I had sworn off trying to complete Heritage until I hit the glory years -- which is the mid-1970s for me.

 

I knew I wouldn't be able to help myself when that time came, and now here it is, and apparently I'm a maniac. It really was not that difficult. Sure, I had to pace myself and make sure I had cash set aside for the 20 bucks per week I'd spend on short-prints, and I couldn't pursue a heck of a lot of other cards or sets during that time, but I did not struggle. Yeah, it was more than I should pay and there shouldn't be any short-prints in the first place, especially not 100 of them, but I guess if you put your mind to it.

 

 

These were the last two cards I needed to finish it, both short-prints. All the Highlights cards are short-printed and they have the lamest captions I think I have ever seen on a baseball card. Topps put so little effort into the Michael Lorenzen caption that it couldn't spare the needed hyphen and now it looks like Topps is mocking the pitcher's hitting ability.

After checking these two cards off my want list, both on the blog and TCDB, I had to re-check the entire set for gremlins and such. I came across only one issue.

Back when I was opening my hobby box, I displayed the above pack. It contained a variation card of the Pirates' Henry Davis. I didn't suspect a thing. No one reading did either. It's sat in my collection sneakily until I was going through all the card back numbers and saw the variation mention on Davis' card number.

I scrambled through my doubles to see if I had the regular card. Nope. So now it's en route from ebay. I guess until I get it, the set isn't technically complete.

 

 

BUT I'M SAYING IT IS! THERE IT IS, ALL 500 CARDS! (Don't look too closely!)

 

I also need to thank those who also enthusiastically collected this set because they had been waiting for years, like me, for Heritage to finally get to 1975. There aren't a lot of bloggers left working on sets like this these days, but there are a lot of former bloggers as well as collectors that I know through this blog. So it helped that there were diehards like me.

 

Now, I'm not quite as together as I was when I finished the 2023 set (which, by the way, was also this year, too -- I've been a completing machine in 2024). I don't have a binder for this thing, nor even pages. I happened to complete the set during the poorest time of the year -- late August/early September.

So that will have to come later. Here's your first page without the page:

Those are all short-prints as the first 100 were SP'd this year. That caused a big stir but as I knew all along, it doesn't matter where the SPs are, if you want to complete the set.

 

Heritage did well with the subsets as far as look and placing them at the right spots in the set, for instance the Highlights cards are 1-7, the league leaders cards are 306-313, the postseason cards are 459-466, etc., just like the original '75 set.

But as I said during the box break, you can forget about Heritage matching up cards with the originals for any of the individual players.

Your card-by-card comparisons for #223 and #500, for example. I haven't gone through every single number but just last year there were a bunch of obvious homages smacking me in the face. It's sad that during the tribute to my all-time favorite set, Heritage decided to scrap the homages.

That should make me madder than I am but somehow I am not. Maybe it's because I had the opportunity to collect a super-colorful set again just like I did when I was 9 years old. It's why I could press on, despite the All-Stars not being yellow-red, despite the manager cards showing up when they didn't in '75, despite the 97 rookie cards (I'm sure I undercounted by three) after there being none in Heritage just a few years ago.

 

As for what's next, there will be the high numbers series coming out and I probably won't be able to resist that. I didn't finish what I planned to do with 2023 high numbers, but that was because the 2024 set came out so quick (two months earlier than 2023).

I'd also like to pick up the rest of the Baseball Flashbacks cards since they feature all the guys I first grew up watching. (These should be just as plentiful as the New Age Performer cards, which they definitely are not).

But mostly I have 2024 Heritage out of my hair and a lot quicker than I thought. So I'll enjoy pursuing other card interests without a definite set mission in mind for a few months. It will feel good.

As for 2025 Heritage -- well, that's another set from my youngster days, so we'll see (if you thought the card backs were unreadable this year ...). These homages to 1970s sets are going to eventually kill me.