Lesser Heritage

 

A look at the annual minor league version of Topps Heritage. 

 

Better late than never, Topps released their version of what constitutes a minor league set these days in the by now all too familiar 1972 Topps format. As far as I can tell, these can be a fun and affordable box break most years, as long as you don't mind players in their minor league uniform. I ended up in a group break via Twitter and ended up with most of the Cardinals affiliated cards for my team collection.

The main complaint I have with these is how nearly every card looks the same. I know part of this is paying tribute to the original set, but aside from Jordan Walker, everyone is captured in the same "photo day" style with some sort of blue sky background. The only card I am missing is Matthew Liberatore's card, as he has two cards in the set and I only ended up with the "Traded" one. (It would have been cool to see "Traded" variations in the major league set, but as far as I know they didn't even attempt this.)

I ended up being randomly assigned the Diamondbacks in this break (as I often do), but this landed me my first ever Hillsboro Hops cards. Topps, what are you doing here with the team names? Neither of these two players were on the team when I attended my one and only professional sports event of the year during the summer, out in Hillsboro. Carroll only played a few games for the Hops in May, and Short hasn't been on the team since 2019.

I like these pack wrapper inserts that take the design of the original 1972 Topps pack wrapper and make a baseball card out of it.

These I'm a little less familiar with. Apparently it's modeled after some sort of stamps in the 1972 Venezuelan release. It's always fascinating to read about those older Venezuelan sets that drew heavily on the Topps cards of the day, but were at times their own thing.