Card Critic: 2012 Topps Heritage Review

Are those braces on Escobar's teeth?
I feel old.

This time four years ago I argued that Topps should've killed off the Heritage brand with the 2008 Heritage '59 set. I stand by that sentiment. I understand that you don't kill a cash cow, but collecting a Topps Classic 1963 set would weigh better with my definition of the word "heritage." That said, I like this year's set—with a few caveats.

One thing I have to mention right away: The Topps checklister had one final chance to honor Stan Musial. One more chance. He or she could've put a worthy Cardinal veteran like Lance Berkman in Musial's final checklist-number slot. But noooooo. You want to know who got #250? Jon Jay. No, not him. This guy. What Heritage used to get right was the practice of checklist-matching current stars to their team-themed original-set counterparts. Number 1 in the 1960 Topps set was Early Wynn of the Chicago White Sox. Number 1 of the 2009 Topps Heritage set? Mark Buerhle of the Chicago White Sox. Number 20 of the 1957 Topps set is Hank Aaron of the Milwaukee Braves. His checklist-matched counterpart in 2006 Heritage? Andruw Jones of the Atlanta Braves. I could go on, but you get the idea. There were very few heroes at the top of the Topps universe of the 1960s: Sandy Koufax, Mickey Mantle, Hank Aaron, Willie Mays, and Stan Musial. And I'm sorry, but though he may be a St. Louis Cardinal, Jon Jay is not even a cardboard stand-in for Stan Musial.

Which leads to a larger question: Did Topps abandon the checklist-matching system for 2012 Heritage? Answer: Not really. They just abandoned their standard hero-worship model. They're not matching based on ability, but by team and field position. For example, Jay Bruce is on number 400. In 1963, another Cincy outfielder had that spot—Frank Robinson. Number 348 is Miguel Cabrera, the Detroit Tigers' hard-hitting first (now third) baseman. His original-set counterpart? Vic Wertz. Pick a card at random ... number 364 Jose Tabata of the Pittsburgh Pirates. In the original set, #364 is Howie Goss of the Pittsburgh Pirates. Okay, another one, this time not from a team that was around in 1963: Desmond Jennings at #195. In 1963 that was Manny Jimenez, also an All-Star Rookie, from the KC Athletics. Milwaukee Brewers' outfielder Corey Hart is on #414. In 1963, that's Ty Cline, of the Milwaukee Braves. Very clever. It's a huge Topps checklist-history-matching in-joke.

Also, I love that players are in their new uniforms, simply because none of them appear to be blatantly Photoshopped (although most if not all have been blatantly Photoshopped). One of the few cards that looks off is Carlos Beltran's. It's not quite as bad as the old-school St. Louis airbrushings, but for some reason the Topps artists just haven't seemed to master the "STL" on a cap. But Mark Buerhle, Prince Fielder, CJ Wilson, Jed Lowrie, Michael Pineda, and others that I have seen look great. With the exception of a few cards, the maturation of airbrushing has been a boon to recent sets. It used to be that the Topps artists would try to obscure the old uniform, or break out the Cray-Pas and go to town (see the Airbrushing Invitational Rodeo I did a few years back). Now, with the sophistication of Adobe CS5, Prince Fielder on the Brewers easily transitions to Prince Fielder on the Tigers without too many hiccups.

I'm okay, for some reason, with there being variations up the wahzoo, though the specific types of variations seem lacking. Color swaps are alright, but image swaps? C'mon, that's kind of lazy. Also, super-short-printed error variations seem to taunt the average set builder, especially if it becomes generally accepted that they are part of the master set. I would've liked to see the incorporation of older players, original to the set. Maybe a Rookie Stars card featuring Bryce Harper, Jesus Montero, Nick Hagadone, and Pete Rose? That would be a variation worth chasing. 

And speaking of the Rookie Stars subset, why are the same players featured on different cards? And why do those players also warrant their own cards? Did I miss something? Is this 2003-04 Topps Basketball Rookie Matrix, or is it especially hard for a player to meet rookie status nowadays? There are so many great young players out there that it seems completely frivolous—and gives the impression that Topps doesn't really respect its customers—to showcase the same players in different permutations across multiple cards. I feel hoodwinked.

Also, I think the photography is worth a mention The original '63s have aged so well because the photography standards were higher. Kodachrome, or whatever the professional equivalent at the time, featured brilliant color and crisp images. For its Heritage line (since 2006's Heritage '57 set), Topps has tried to evoke an old-timey feel for its photography. I can't say that it's worked. Continuing with this year's set, some of the posed sideline images appear muddled, like the designers have been hitting the diffuse filter pretty hard in the color-correction process. 

Finally, the card stock feels leathery on the back. If you put a card under a microscope and magnified the back so that you got down to the very fiber, would it be thatched? It feels as if this would be true.

Overall, I'm excited for this set. It suffers a little out of the gate with the needless carousel of rookies and the muddy photos, but it gets points for the clever checklisting nods and for the (generally) clean airbrushing.

Oh, and one more thing: These cards don't stink like Sex Panther cologne, like the 2012 Topps flagship product does. They smell like baseball cards should smell, despite the lack of gum in the pack.

(RIP indestructible, disgusting Topps gum)

The Future Was Burright, And Then

I wanted to write about this card because not only does Larry have a big ol' chaw of tobacco in his cheek and it looks like a paper airplane got stuck in his hair, but his action shot is definitely fixin' to creep up all slow like on that there raccoon and kill him some dinner. Hell, his nickname was Possum. But that was before I found his full career stats on Baseball Reference.

Sure, he looks optimistic, scanning the stands for blondes, contemplating when he should re-shave the line from his hairline to the bridge of his nose, but let's get one thing straight right away. Before the baseball gods built Mario Mendoza to remind man that hitting a baseball is hard, they needed a prototype. And his name was Larry Burright. And he was bad.

In 1961, after performing well at the Double AA level, he was promoted to Triple AAA and celebrated by connecting for just 2 hits in 52 plate appearances. And for his struggle, he was rewarded with a trip to the big time. I'm not sure what the Dodger brass was thinking, except maybe Junior Gilliam was getting a little too creaky-kneed or something, but Burright didn't exactly light it up. I don't have it in me to sugar-coat Larry's futility at the plate. I'll leave that to the Topps copywriter:

During the first half of the 1962 campaign, Larry was one of the N.L.'s top 10 batters.

Really? He finished the season with a .205 average. In all actuality, his fall down the leaderboard was fairly spectacular. Burright knocked the cover off the ball in May as the Dodgers' starting shortstop, cresting as high as .375 on May 20. Too bad the season didn't end there. On June 2, he was hitting .324. And then the bottom fell out: Burright did not get another base hit until June 30, finishing up the month with a .248 average. By July 28 he was at .214, and from the beginning of August until the end of the year, he was pretty much a late-innings defensive replacement, coasting in at .205.

On top of being a terrible hitter, Burright was not too great when it mattered defensively: his error in the top of the ninth inning of the one-game play-off against the Giants allowed a run to score and turned a close game into a hopeless situation for the Dodgers. Or as the Topps copywriter put it:

He has good range and makes difficult plays look easy.


Uh... let me re-write that blurb for you:

What started as a stellar 1962 campaign as the Dodgers' everyday shortstop crashed and burned in spectacular fashion, like a slow-motion train wreck. 

Because It Should Exist: 1963 Topps #299 Rookie Stars

1948 - 1979 Countdown: #35. 1963 Fleer

Up until my most recent week's absence from writing, I was on a tear, one not unlike Fleer's first series of cards in 1963. I'm not in any way equating my writing with this set in terms of importance within the hobby, nor is Topps suing The Baseball Card Blog to get the idea into my thick skull that baseball cards is their thing, not mine.

Because Topps blocked Fleer in the courts, what could have been a landmark set and perhaps the start to a beautiful Fleer decade was stopped before it really got started. With only 66 cards, plus a scarce, unnumbered checklist, the set Fleer released has to be viewed as incomplete.

As far as formal checklist strategy is concerned, there are a number of interesting things going on. This is the first Fleer checklist to group team members alphabetically by team, though on a much smaller scale than in the sets released in the 1980s. 1963 opens with a handful of Baltimore Orioles, then a bunch of Boston Red Sox, followed by a few Cleveland Indians, Kansas City A's, New York Yankees, Minnesota Twins, Washington Senators, Chicago Cubs, Cincinnati Reds, Houston Colt .45s, LA Dodgers, Milwaukee Braves, New York Mets, Philadelphia Phillies, Pittsburgh Pirates, St. Louis Cardinals, and San Francisco Giants.


At 66 cards, not everybody from these teams is included. Take the Yankees: only Ralph Terry and Bobby Richardson are in the set. Presumably Howard, Mantle, Maris, et al would've been in a later series. What is surprising is the All-Star quality found in the short checklist. Brooks Robinson, Roberto Clemente, Carl Yastrzemski, Sandy Koufax, Bob Gibson, Warren Spahn, Don Drysdale, and Willie Mays all made it in. And let's highlight the Mays card for a second. His is the only card separated from the rest of his team (Mays is on card 5, while the other Giants are on 64-66). Another notable card in the set is that of Milwaukee Brave Joe Adcock (#46). This is a short-printed card, making it harder to find than the other 65.

The design is classic Fleer, following 1960's and 1961's lead with white borders. This set also marks the first modern-era use of fielder position silhouettes in the front-of-card design (1973 and 1976 Topps being the others). Finally, the Best of the Set is the rookie of Maury Wills (#43). For reasons that are still hard to figure out, Wills was one of the very few players whom Topps did not tender a player contract to before his rookie season. Therefore, this is his true rookie card. His first Topps card would not come until 1969. All those times you've seen Maury Wills on a 1962 Topps design? Yup, card doesn't really exist.

Give Me Your Creases, Your Misspellings, Your Dinged Corners...

It's 'Best Of' season. So to get into the spirit, I thought I'd post a little something about my favorite purchases of 2007. A few caveats before I begin. I'm not counting cards I got in the wildly popular Great Goudey Trade-away, nor I am taking into account the cards I packed into storage after moving back in September. So really, my own Best Of should be called Best Purchases September through December, 2007.

Best Card of a Wizened Old Timer/Manager:
1951 Bowman Bucky Harris
On the wall of my parents' kitchen is a panoramic photograph from the 1924 World Series, with both lineups (Washington Senators and New York Giants) assembled along the third base line. Walter Johnson is in his pitcher's warmup sweater, Bill Terry looks to be maybe all of twenty-four, there's an oompah band in the right corner getting ready to strike up, and there are a few faces blurred out from moving while the camera moved. The reason I'm mentioning this is because about halfway up the photo, in the center of the packed stands, President Coolidge is flanked by John McGraw and the young Senators player/manager Bucky Harris. Flash ahead 27 years and here's Harris back helming the Senators. Another fun thing about Bucky Harris: though the guy had nine career regular-season home runs over 12 seasons, he managed two dingers in the '24 World Series.


Worst Spelling Error Left Uncorrected:
2006-07 Upper Deck Derk Fisher [sic] I bought a pack of these cards at Target thinking they were from this year. Getting this card of Fisher more than made up for my disappointment (I was trying to determine who to draft for my fantasy basketball team, currently mired in last). Not a bad design, not memorable... I'm still trying to figure out what the defender's tattoo is; it's either one of the ThunderCats or is of Justin Bateman in Teen Wolf Too.


Best Miscut: 1953 Topps Clem Labine
I love miscut cards, the older the better. I love how it accentuates the fact that it's all about cardboard––and machines that cut cardboard––image be damned. Another fun thing: it's self-reflexive. One of the ads on the outfield wall behind Labine is for Topps Gum.


Best Use of a Nickname:
1963 Topps Choo Choo Coleman
It's almost as if the Topps copywriters bet each other they could write a whole card and never once mention a player's real name.

On an unrelated note, someone should write an essay on the effectiveness of the careers of Choo Choo Coleman and Pumpsie Green on race relations within their respective cities (New York and Boston). I know very little about Coleman, but how can a grown man command respect while being referred to as 'Choo Choo'?

As for Green, I have always considered him to be the unfortunate symbol of the deep-seated racism and segregationist beliefs of the Boston Red Sox of the 1950s, from Yawkey to Higgins. It would be interesting to read about what civil leaders and thinkers from the time thought about the teams and these two men.