Packs That Just Showed Up #3

Let's keep the Topps Heritage posts coming, shall we?  This next pack that somehow showed up at my house is a retail pack of 2016 Topps Heritage High Number Baseball.  This set features stars from seven years ago in the 1967 design.

 

The wrapper depicts a baseball player for a nondescript team getting tripped up by the controversial "mashed potato hazard," a short-lived attempt to slow runners on the basepaths during a portion of the 1966 season.  A literal and figurative "hot potato," the obstacle was abandoned after a two-week test run that August.  The baseball world never got to see the reputed follow-up, gravy foul lines.

Let's see who we get.

623 Denard Span

536 Ryan Madson

596 Adam Warren

661 Geovany Soto

RP-JU Julio Urias Rookie Performers

You know what, I had this card scanned and ready, but I'm going to leave it out of this post.  This blog has no space available for men who abuse women.  Insert or not, I'm moving on.

Actually, let's go back a step and recognize the good works of Denard Span, who started the Denard Span Foundation, which aims to "serve and empower single-parent homes."  Bravo to you, good sir.

523 Logan Verrett

655 Matt Reynolds

558 Mike Napoli

654 Brad Ziegler

As far as I know, no domestic abuse pleas from any of this quartet.

And while we're at it, let's give a shout out to Brad Ziegler, who is apparently a pretty serious card collector.  One of us! 

Not an amazing pack, but still a nice look back a few years.

Completion! - A Familiar Face

This is a post that's a long time coming.  Shortly after completing my 1959 Topps set, I received the final card needed to finish the modern set using the same design, the 2008 Topps Heritage High Number set.  The card that completed the set was #686 Gavin Floyd of the Chicago White Sox, a card that was short printed.

Let's take a tour of some of the highlights of this set.

Unlike it's 1959 design-sake, the Rookie Stars subset checklist was amazingly robust, featuring rookie cards of Max Scherzer...

Evan Longoria...

...and Clayton Kershaw.

(Editor's Note: Death Stare Cards normally eschew graded and slabbed cards, but when the time came to acquire this Kershaw, this BCCG version was actually selling for less than any raw versions we could find.)

My Milwaukee Brewers are looking good in this team photo.  Good job by the photographer to keep everyone especially well lit while the sun was rising behind them.

Onto the inserts.  There are more Then & Now cards, continuing from the original series.

Some more Then & Now cards, and the first half of the Rookie Performers inserts.  Again, a distinctly strong checklist with these rookies.  That Kershaw is very nice.

More Rookie Performers.

The last two rookies and some of the 2008 Flashbacks.  Griffey, Pujols, Ichiro, all legends.

And to finish things off, I also completed the partial parallel of black backs.  These are actually very easy to find, and key cards usually cost less as a black back than the regular green ink back.  I think I finished these off before I was a parent, and I'm slated to have a teenager in the house later this summer.  So it goes.

The Kershaw black back parallel.  This one actually came out of one of my boxes 15+ years ago, didn't have to hunt it down.

Is this the end of the story?  Maybe not.  I do have a pretty tall stack of chrome parallels from this set and the regular Heritage set.  That impossible-to-find Jerry Hairston is throwing me off the scent, though.  (Look it up, it's a dark corner of Topps Heritage history.)

As for now, I'm happy with this set in its binder with the requisite box cover header.  One of my most enjoyable periods of collecting is, for the most part, done.