Now that the 2022 Heritage Clayton Kershaw card has been secured, I can update a post series that hasn't been visited in just over three years.
But, first, a brief diatribe on not being able to obtain the Heritage Kershaw card until there was barely a week left in 2022.
Kershaw's card was stashed in the Heritage High Numbers series, which isn't released until the fall, or in 2022's case, just before the start of winter. This is ridiculous, even though I fully understand Topps' reason why.
I have known Heritage High Numbers since its beginning as a place where new players show up or players who have changed teams. Kershaw is neither a new player nor, thank goodness, has he changed teams. But, in an effort to entice people to purchase High Numbers, the last couple years Topps has placed veteran star players into High Numbers to make it more attractive. In 2021, Walker Buehler didn't show up until High Numbers.
This coming year, Heritage should be recognizing the 1974 design, and that year was the end -- for a long time -- of releasing sets in multiple stages for Topps, so I hope we're done with this "high numbers" nonsense (probably not).
Oh, and Topps also made Kershaw an SP in High Numbers. Jerks. Thank goodness I have a blog.
OK, I'm done being cranky. Let's get to the point of the post.
The Through The Years post is an attempt to track how many Topps designs Clayton Kershaw has been featured on over the years. This was inspired by blogger Brian's attempt for Joe Mauer over at the casually updated
Highly Subjective And Completely Arbitrary.
Topps likes using its old designs so much that accumulating these hasn't been too difficult. And even though just three years has passed since my
last update, I've added a bunch more, because Topps has really gone into overdrive on the self-design love the last couple years.
Here is what I've added since the last post in November 2019. Designs Kershaw appeared on for the first time are 1954, 1973, 1974, 1984, 1986 and 1992. I also added updated versions of the 1971 and 1972 designs because what I had for Kershaw previously for those two are mini cards, and we all know there were no minis in 1971 and 1972.
But that's not all of the past designs that have shown Kershaw the last three years.
Just a few. Yeah, two 1952 designs. There's another 1957, as well as a couple new 1965s, in my collection, too, I just didn't feel like pulling them out. Redundancy makes me lazy. (And let's not even get into all the new 1987s 😒).
So with all those additions, it's time to add to the year-by-year rundown that I've done for each of these posts.
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| 1951 | |
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| 1952 |
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| 1953 |
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| 1954 |
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| 1957 |
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| 1958 |
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| 1959 |
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| 1960 |
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| 1961 |
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| 1962 |
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| 1963 |
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| 1964 |
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| 1965 |
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| 1966 |
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| 1967 |
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| 1968 |
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| 1969 |
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| 1970 |
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| 1971 |
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| 1972 |
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| 1973 |
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| 1974 |
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| 1975 |
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| 1976 |
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| 1977 |
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| 1978 |
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| 1980 |
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| 1982 |
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| 1983 |
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| 1984 |
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| 1985 |
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| 1986 |
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| 1987 |
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| 1989 |
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| 1990 |
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| 1991 |
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| 1992 |
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| 2001 |
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| 2008 |
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| 2009 |
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| 2010 |
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| 2011 |
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| 2012 |
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| 2013 |
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| 2014 |
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| 2015 |
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| 2016 |
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| 2017 |
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| 2018 |
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| 2019 |
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| 2020 |
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| 2021 |
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| 2022 |
That's all of them, or at least all I have. I swear next time I'm just going to take a snapshot of all of them together to save time, but I know that will spoil the effect. (But it won't illustrate any less effectively that Topps is determined to use "Kershaw On The Mound Throwing A Pitch" as his flagship photo for his entire career. See 2009-22).
I've made quite a bit of progress, although that 1978 is still not right (the design and that Dodger uniform Kershaw is wearing). Archives could've corrected that this year by putting Kershaw with the '78 design instead of another '63 card of him.
But I'm not worried. At the rate Topps is churning out the oldie designs, I may have this wrapped up by 2024.
Here is what's left:
1955, 1956, 1979, 1981, 1988, 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007
I am hoping that Topps continues its insert trend of 35 years ago by finally giving us the 1988 design this coming year. I would think that the 1956 design is coming to Archives soon, although I think I said that in the last post (Archives did revisit 1955 recently but Kershaw showed up on the '74 design that year).
All right, nothing more to do now except sit back and wait for Topps to bury us in old designs.
Comments
However Topps does create runs like this for the Transcendent “product” though only for the high rollers who attend the VIP event with a current player. A set of cards on each Topps design is created for that player and printed at a /87 or so print run and given to the attendees.
So the concept is known to Topps and I would definitely not be surprised to see it be used for other players and other products eventually. Though I think it could easily also become a be-careful-wish-for-concept if they do it as a /139 or some such low # if you order direct before 10 am on Tuesday or something. And if you don’t…
LOL, on the last Through the Years post, I asked Topps to maybe take it back a notch on inserts and where did that get me?
I have no pull.
Topps has such a large design pool, it would be cool to see them use the designs from other ports from time to time.
You'd think all this recycling by a cardboard maker would be a good thing, but they do more of this than actually create new designs....
They used to do this Cardboard Icons thing...oversized reprints of the entire flagship card run of big names: https://www.cardboardconnection.com/2015-topps-cardboard-icons-baseball
Which honestly was cool idea that could probably make a comeback in some form now.
I sprang for the /199 Frank Thomas set, and while I'm glad I own it, it won't come as a surprise to anyone that the execution was less than ideal. Seems like they hastily blew up low quality images of the original cards, rather than properly scaling them at high resolution.