Ignoring history

 

I was made aware of a major change in Topps Heritage by Cards On Cards over on the House of Cardboard Discord the other day.

 

I don't pay a lot of attention to the inserts in Heritage. To me, inserts are almost incidental to the brand -- I like Heritage for its tribute to older sets and those older sets didn't have inserts. But I've been attracted to an insert card here and there because it captured a moment from whatever year Heritage was featuring that appealed to me or summed up the year for me.

 

But that's all gone now.

 

Heritage has overhauled its inserts in 2025. The following regularly appearing Heritage inserts are not part of Heritage this year, at least not yet:

 

Baseball Flashbacks

Clubhouse Collection relics

New Age Performers

News Flashbacks

Then and Now

 

Also, the following haven't shown up yet, but they may be regular parts of Heritage High Numbers, which is released much later (I pay even less attention to High Numbers inserts so that's why I'm unclear):

 

Award Winners

Combo Cards

Rookie Performers

Now and Then

 

I expect some these to show up in High Numbers because they are inserts with current players as subject matter, stuff like Rookie Performers, Award Winners and the pointless, pointless, can-it-please-die Combo Cards.

 

But this doesn't explain why New Age Performers hasn't shown up, which is nothing but current players.

 

New Age Performers is not a big loss for me because the random assortment of current players never felt like it belonged in Heritage. But I did enjoy the era-appropriate colors, fonts and designs used with the set.

 

There is much less of that in 2025 Heritage.

 

 

Some of the best-designed cards in Heritage were the inserts, evoking the feelings of the period, even if I wasn't born or barely alive during the selected year.

 

 

My concern regarding the Heritage inserts that featured older players from the selected tribute year is that Fanatics/Topps just doesn't want to do the work required/pay for featuring old-time players. If this is the case, the timing on this is terrible for me.

 

Heritage has moved into the mid-1970s, exactly when I started following baseball. The old-time players are now the guys I watched on TV as a little guy. They are my players. After years and years of buying Heritage cards featuring old guys in the inserts who I had only heard of in retelling, finally we were getting to some '70s guys I knew through and through.

 

It was getting exciting through 2022, 2023 and 2024 Heritage, seeing guys like John Mayberry and Dave Concepcion in Heritage. Finally the inserts were going from "incidental" to "wooo, I want that!" But now we're not doing this anymore I guess?

 

 

Then there is the matter of the News Flashbacks disappearing. Again, the news and pop culture topics covered by this insert set has handled mostly moments I only read about or saw on retro TV. But picking up a card of the Astrodome was fun.

 

 

And adding a card of a music legend might have been the best part of the Heritage inserts (I even have a Heritage Beatles card around here somewhere).

 

 

 

Heritage had its finger on the pulse of the given year with the News Flashbacks and it was nice to relive the moments -- not my moments -- but stuff I had heard in hand-me-down stories or watched on Nick at Night.

 

 

And slowly, ever slowly, Heritage started getting to moments that I knew -- childhood moments that have stayed with me since I sat in front of a TV without a remote because it wasn't invented yet.

 

I was looking forward to Heritage catching up to a time when I knew every single thing happening in the news, on TV, on the radio -- enjoying the zeitgeist of the late 1970s and early 1980s. But apparently that's not happening.

 

Because now we have this:

 

This is what passes for an insert in Heritage in 2025. Young dude who plays current ball who probably needs his parents to fill in details of 1975 because he certainly wasn't around for it.

 

Just about all of the 2025 Heritage inserts are something like this. The only significant exception is the Notable Americans insert set. I was so accustomed to everything in Heritage being created as a call-back to the featured year that I thought Notable Americans was something created in 1976. Nope.

 

These are the inserts for Heritage this year:

 

Player Icons (checklist of random current stars)

1976 Redefined (this actually contains players who were around in '76, which is why I'm confused Baseball Flashbacks is gone)

Heritage 25th anniversary (checklist of random current stars)

Notable Americans

Through the Years (checklist of random stars, that also includes some '76 guys but also current guys)

 

That's all you get for remembering 1976 -- aside from the design of the base cards.

 

Phooey.

 

So I thought I'd try to come up with a checklist for a couple 1976-themed Heritage inserts using the traditional insert sets from past years (If I was a custom-card maker I'd do the whole picture thing, too).

 

2025 Heritage Baseball Flashbacks

BF-1: Mark Fidrych (I am immediately sad we don't get this card)

BF-2: Bill Madlock

BF-3: George Brett

BF-4: Mike Schmidt (That 4-homer game!)

BF-5: Dave Kingman

BF-6: Ron LeFlore

BF-7: Reggie Jackson (as an Oriole!)

BF-8: George Foster

BF-9: Randy Jones

BF-10: Jim Palmer

BF-11: Frank Tanana

BF-12: Jerry Koosman

BF-13: Chris Chambliss

BF-14: Vida Blue

BF-15: Joe Morgan

 

2025 Heritage News Flashbacks

NF-1: Bicentennial Celebration (this could be its own separate set, every neighborhood had a party)

NF-2: Jimmy Carter elected president

NF-3: 1976 Winter Olympics (Dorothy Hamill)

NF-4: 1976 Summer Olympics (lots of choices)

NF-5: The Who plays the loudest concert on record at the time

NF-6: The Muppet Show debuts

NF-7: Viking 2 lands on Mars, taking first up-close photos of the planet

NF-8: Frampton Comes Alive! is released

NF-9: Boston releases its debut record

NF-10: Rocky

NF-11: The Bad News Bears

NF-12: Charlie's Angels debuts (Farrah Fawcett poster)

NF-13: CB radio craze

NF-14: Barbara Walters becomes first female TV nightly news anchor

NF-15: Hank Aaron retires

I could easily make the subsets a lot bigger, but 15 cards each would be exciting enough for me to collect. I wouldn't even need the other insert sets with those two checklists.

 

 

 

Looking back on the most recent Heritage sets and looking at the inserts, you could see this coming. The News Flashbacks of the last couple of years have not been exciting, often featuring a generic photo, as if they couldn't come up with a picture from the actual time period or moment. (If you look to next year's Heritage set continuing the 2025 Heritage format means totally ignoring Star Wars).

Although I haven't collected any of the Heritage insert sets, I'm sad about this latest avoidance of history. The current public is already woefully deficient in their knowledge of history, thanks to the decline of newspapers, the politicization of anything and everything, and fewer people willing to read in their spare time.

 

Sure, there's not a lot a card set can do about that. But it's just another case of ignoring history.