20 Questions on … Topps Heritage baseball cards

Willie Mays

I returned to card collecting in 1999. 2001 Topps Heritage was the first product I was REALLY excited about since my return to collecting. Heritage has been a collecting staple for me ever since. Love it! (Bowman Heritage on the other hand… ) The one autograph I’d like to see in Heritage would be Kent Tekulve of the Pittsburgh Pirates.

Wade Boggs

Wilmer Mizell

In terms of autographs, there are a slew of Phillies fan favorites from the ’60s who Topps seems to consistently ignore: Cookie Rojas, Art Mahaffey, Tony Taylor, Clay Dalyrmple, and Rick Wise all immediately come to mind as players Topps should get on autograph cards ASAP. These guys aren’t getting any younger. I always appreciate all the autographs that Topps issues as part of the Heritage set, but (just to use this year’s set as an example) I’d rather have any of the before-mentioned Phillies autos than John Herrnstein or Ray Herbert.

Darryl Strawberry!

Pete Rose

I feel the need to add an addendum to my previous comment. Topps managed to royally screw the pooch with their Mahaffey autograph in this year’s Heritage set. I can only assume that Topps doesn’t have anyone on staff whose job it is to think this stuff through and that they love angering their customers. I still can’t believe Topps has a monopoly for another five years. I’m so sick of this crap: https://14kphillies.wordpress.com/2015/03/08/just-eff-you-topps-eff-you/

From mod: For a majority of the lesser-known players, the pattern in Heritage is to show them on what is their final card. Not always, but Mahaffey’s final basic Topps card came in 1966 — as a Cardinal.

I am actually having a Twitter conversation with a Topps representative about this right now. I don’t care what the Topps Heritage pattern is. From a team collector perspective, it makes far more logical sense to issue autograph cards for lesser-known players with the team they are most associated with. Mahaffey played all but his final season with the Phillies and was on the All-Star team twice with the Phillies. This particular case is fairly easy — if Topps is only going to issue one Mahaffey autograph card, and right now there’s no reason to believe that they will ever issue another, then they should’ve made sure it was one that pictured him with the Phillies.

Now, Topps informed me that they weren’t able to work out a deal with Mahaffey in previous years. Fine, but currently Topps also has the Archives set. Instead of issuing his only autograph card as a Carrdinal, throw the Mahaffey autograph card into that set instead. This isn’t rocket science, and I personally feel that Topps’s pattern, as you call it, is lazy. It took me all of 15 seconds to figure out how to make a Mahaffey Phillies autograph card work for this year.

Very happy to have seen two rounds of Pumpsie Green autographs!

Would like to see an autograph of:

Rollie Fingers
Vida Blue
Dave Kingman
Willie Mays
Dick Allen
Sidd Finch

I think Topps Heritage has become the gold standard for baseball card collectors. I even think it out shines the Topps flagship Series I set. Every year I trade with the same guys on different message boards that I have been trading with for over 10 years. This release is for set collectors only in my opinion. If you are looking to make money or pull a high dollar hit this product is not for you.
In the past years Topps has tweaked the Heritage brand a bit with the inclusions of minis and action image variations. I hope this is the farthest they will take changing the set and keep it as close to the combo that has worked in years past, 450 base cards, 50 short printed cards. Subsets, New Age Performers, Then and Now, Baseball Flashbacks, News Flashbacks, clubhouse collection and Real One Autographs.
That my friend is a recipe for success!

I love the Heritage concept and I’ve collected the cards each year since its inception. However, as we approach 2016 and the design of my favorite series of all time, the 1967 set, I do have concerns. In the first few years, Topps put a lot of effort into “recreating the old set”: same number of cards as in the original set, poses that mimiced those in the earlier set, numbering of cards that matched similar players in the older set. But as time has passed, Topps has gotten lazy. There’s been no attempt to recreate the checklist design of the older sets in the last several years. And the multi-player cards have been abominable! Have players today become so impossible to work with that a photographer for Topps can’t get two stars to recreate a retro two-player pose? When I dig into the 2016 Heritage set, I want to see checklists with the little disembodied mug shots. I want to see B&W World Series card with the wood TV set border. I want to see team cards and league leader cards that look just like the 1967 set. And I want to see classic multi-player cards poses! I’m just afraid I’m going to be disappointed, though, because the last few years, Topps seems to be going through the motions with the Heritage set.