Sunday, March 20, 2011

Heritage Blister Pack

Another set has been released and another chase has begun. As per my usual practice, I won't be posting a want list for 2011 Topps Heritage until I've picked up a substantial amount of packs. I plan on buying a lot of this stuff. On the whole, I'm pretty impressed. Topps upped the number of cards to 9 per pack from the usual 8 we've come to know without raising the price. This is a classic design, one I had been looking forward to quite a bit after last year's lackluster look.

For starters, I just bought two blister packs at Target. Each blister pack contains three packs and a bonus "black parallel" pack. The trade-off for getting the black parallel cards as far as I can tell is that there's no chance at pulling any of the red tint parallels, unlike with single packs. I think it's more than a fair trade. I've posted the results of one of the blisters here and I'll post the other one at a later point.

Pack 1:
25 - Starlin Castro (It figures that my first 2011 Topps Heritage card is a Cub, and therefore not welcome on this blog.)
301 - Clay Buchholz

294 - Philadelphia Phillies (I'm a sucker for old-timey team cards. This one cracks me up, as you can see the entire front row is sitting on something rendered invisible.)

319 - Tim Lincecum Shows His Stuff (I don't know how many "in-action" type cards are in this set, but I like them.)
264 - Jeff Niemann
383 - Daniel Hudson
75 - Chris Tillman (How do I not know who Tillman is? He threw a no-hitter and one-hitter for AAA Norfolk last season according to the back of the card.)
182 - Cody Ross (The darling of the 2010 playoffs.)
1 - Josh Hamilton

Pack 2:
277 - Pedro Alvarez
215 - Asdrubal Cabrera
183 - Mike Pelfrey
214 - Chris Sale

149 - Ryan Franklin (This might be my favorite card of the entire blister pack. Ryan Franklin Cardinals cards are few and far between, even though this will be his fifth season with St. Louis and he is their closer.)

447 - Shin-Soo Choo (Internet research tells me that this is a short-printed card along with anything numbered between 426 and 500. Since there's no obvious markings to short printed cards as there was in the past two sets, I'm glad that these aren't skip-numbered this year. There's a disturbing upward trend of players without caps on cards, but I'm told this was done in an effort to remain true to the original set.)

338 - Brett Gardner (Cartoons on the back! Once the cartoons stop, Topps should consider calling it quits on Heritage.)

18 - Albert Pujols / Ryan Braun Managers' Dream (This is kind of an awkwardly named card, but I'm guessing it's based on an original like most things in Heritage. One thing I have to say about Albert is that it's kind of refreshing, almost to the poing of being comical, to see how he seems to treat almost every player in the league as his best buddy. A lot of superstars are complete jerks, but you don't see that so much in Pujols.)
247 - Jonathan Lucroy
1 of 6 - Checklist (Here's something newish... checklist cards. They're not part of the actual set and are made of a thinner non-Heritage like material.)

Pack 3:
386 - Michael Cuddyer

227 - Cliff Lee (This is an odd looking card. Here's Cliff Lee, looking kind of forlorn, but maybe a little jerkish. It just never sat well with me that Lee wanted out of Seattle before he ever even took the mound for them. I guess you could imagine most players not wanting to play there given their location and current state of their ballclub, but he could have been more professional about it.)
163 - Alex Gordon
251 - Texas Rangers

NF-6 - Dodger Stadium News Flashbacks (Isn't this more of a Baseball Flashback? I tend to expect these to have more of a world news slant.)
279 - Bengie Molina
244 - Lars Anderson

141 - Twilight Years Babe Ruth Special (I don't understand essentially reprinting these instead of coming up with something else that would have still paid tribute to these cards in a way.)
109 - Ted Lilly

Black Parallel Pack:

C14 - AL Strikeout Leaders (One question - why do these cards have a 'C' prefix, which I presume is the same numbering scheme used for the chrome parallels? Also, are they true parallels or did they only make these for certain cards/players? Oops... I guess that was two questions.)

C80 - Bobby Abreu (I do really like the way these look. I think it works. At first, I thought they were going to have a chrome/glossy finish, but they don't.)

C54 - Vance Worley (Yeah, I don't know who he is, either.)

3 comments :

  1. Keep on eye on that Abreau; it's the variation which lists his position as "P"

    I think the manager's dream is having the guy behind Pujols & Braun ;-)

    (btw, package went out to you on Saturday)

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  2. I believe the black borders are numbered with the chrome set. My guess is they are black refractors without the chrome overlay. Somebody probably saw them and said hey, that would make a decent parallel for the value packs.

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  3. Didn't notice the 'P', but after some eBay browsing it seems like all of the various parallel versions have his position labeled that way. Oh well.

    It does look like the numbers line up with the chrome versions. When I was trying to figure this out earlier I must have been looking at a bad checklist, because I could have sworn that the chrome cards did not have the same numbers, but I can see that they do.

    ReplyDelete

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