As a young baseball fan in the late 1970s, I really wanted the Macmillan Baseball Encyclopedia. I didn't know that the one I saw in advertisements was the third edition and it was released in 1976, which is why I was seeing it in every baseball publication I read in 1977, The Sporting News, Baseball Digest, etc. I eventually bought the softcover version from an ad in Baseball Digest (EDIT: Turns out the one I had was not the Macmillan version but one of the updates of the Hy Turkin version. Turkin created the original baseball encyclopedia in the 1950s). I don't remember how much it cost but it was a lot for me at the time, maybe $12.99 or something? When it arrived, I took it everywhere. I distinctly remember taking it across the street onto the porch of our lifelong friends, two girls who didn't care a wit about baseball, and just pouring over the details right there on the porch. The thrill for me was having every player's record, every team's record righ...
I watched a half-a-box break of 2026 Topps Heritage last night. Yikes. I was really glad afterward that I had already made the decision not to chase the set, as I had for 2023, 2024 and 2025 Heritage. It does not look great. Even the replication of the design -- which is not difficult for 1977 Topps -- is not good, which was mostly all I had to keep me dedicated to Heritage the last couple of years. A lot of the photos do not represent 1977 photography and there were those ridiculous blue-sparkle parallels in every third pack and chromes in the rest of them (I also hear the collation is not good). This set is so far away from what it has been and what I was counting on it to be once Heritage reached the mid-1970s set. Very disappointing. So I'm not building any modern sets for the first time in a few years and don't have any large vintage chases either. This is the perfect window to gather those random Dodgers needs, and so with that in mind ... ...