Pirate Autograph Project #13: Warren Morris

Lucky number thirteen.  Since Jumpin Jack Flash has already made his appearance, I have to go with my second favorite Pirate of all-time:  Warren Morris.

I've written about this card before.  But it'll always be one of my favorites, and from the set that got me back into collecting.

Morris could never totally recapture the magic of his rookie season, but was my favorite player during my first years that I was really starting to follow the Pirates exclusively.

Forever Young

Anyone who has been reading my blog for a while should know when I write - really write - I tend to take the scenic route.  But I've added a decent number of readers in recent weeks, so I thought a warning was needed.  If you don't like the long way there, just look out the car window and enjoy the pretty pictures.

When I got married this past October, there weren't a lot of decisions put squarely on my shoulders.  Which isn't to say I wasn't involved (I was).  Or that I wasn't opinionated (I am).  But for the most part Kate and I saw the wedding the same way, and the decisions in regards to food, themes, and overall ambiance reflected who we are as people.  And since we've been damn near attached at the hip since we were 19, the fact that most of these big, sweeping decisions could be made with a few glances and a facial gesture or two didn't come as any great surprise.

But the music?  That was all my kingdom. The playlist was masterfully crafted in a way that I could only trust myself with.  I wouldn't dare entrust the music, the soul of the evening both literally and figuratively, to some total stranger.  I was not about the spend my wedding night watching distant relatives gyrate to the Electric Slide or hear the latest Beyonce tune.  The playlist was as eclectic and expansive as my taste - some early punk smoothly transitioned into some smooth Memphis soul.  The night told the story of my growth as a person and as a music fan, and much like the grandiose combining of the record and dvd collections years earlier, Kate and I moving from two very separate people to one incongruous entity.

But while my initial playlist was pared from 8 hours down to a more reasonable three, one spot was completely blank.  The mother-daughter dance.  I just couldn't find a song that fit what I wanted to express.  And just as important - couldn't find a song that was short enough to get my uncoordinated ass off the dance floor at the most mercifully short length possible.

But as I made list after list of options, I couldn't get away from Bob Dylan's Forever Young.  All 5:01 of it.  Dylan changed the way I listen to music.  Driving on vacation to the beach in the summer of 1999 or 2000 I heard Like a Rolling Stone on the local oldies station.  They didn't play Dylan on any of the Pittsburgh stations we listened to.  And suddenly this music was unlike anything my teenage self had ever heard.  A few years later my mom bought me Dylan's Greatest Hits, which stayed in constant rotation throughout high school.  A Dylan poster hung over my bed.  And as I worked backwards, moving from loving more "classic" rock to being immersed in folk.  It may not have as monumental as Dylan going electric to the rest of the world, but for me it changed the way I looked at the world.

Which is the long way of saying that as I stood there for four and a half minutes (I found a slightly shorter live version in my massive Dylan library) waddling side to side with my mother in a pseudo slow dance, I spent what felt like a great deal of time thinking about...well, time.

For many of us cards are, in one way or another, a way of staying timeless.  Our critics call it a childhood hobby.  And at best our collections are attempts to cling onto passing memories and seasons.  When people find out that I'm married, it leads to natural assumptions.  That I'm older.  Or deeply religious.  Or desperately want a family.  Cause really, I'm well aware that I don't really fit the mold for the "married at 25" category.  And while it all fits together just fine and dandy in my little intellectual and ideological bubble, the "well we've been together nonstop since we were teenagers anyway" argument just doesn't seem quite gratifying enough for most folks.

But isn't that life?  Whether it's baseball cards, or music, or people, we mark out lives with these mileposts.  Ways of breaking down and understanding the passing of time.  And perhaps I'm not too good at playing by the conventions in that regard.  I'm 26, look like I'm 36, behave like I'm 86, and collect cards like I'm just plain old 6.

Flipping through my 1991 binder instantly transports me to my dad buying me a pack or two and a slurpee every time he took me to the gas station with him.  Or 2000, and my dad buying me 20 packs of Topps before dropping me off at grandma and grandpa's for the night before they went for a rare evening out.  Or registering for a Beckett account, feeling like a rebel because I clicked the terms of service saying I was 13 almost a whole half year before my actual 13th birthday.  Or hearing "Like a Rolling Stone" and being taken back to the backseat of our minivan, salty shore air cutting through the windows and the tightly woven lyrics ripping through me and pulling out a kid wanting more than what his boring suburban life could offer.

Our collections, if you'll forgive the drawn out analogy, are our playlists.  These pieces of ourselves placed in time and space.  Memories being made and remade constantly.  At times impossible to explain away to friends, or family, or coworkers.  But the very things that make us who we are, and how we see ourselves.  Whether you're 16 or 66 reading or writing about cards, those memories and connections are at their most basic quite the same.  And either way, may you stay forever young.

I don't always do group breaks, but when I do...

I pull big hits!

It seems like group breaks are all the rage these days (group breaks are the new midnight blaster run?). I've been hesitant to jump in on most.  After all, I can just pick up singles for far less than the average buy in for a case break, and be guaranteed to get cards I want and don't have.  With a group break, the high end potential is there, but the chance of tossing money down the drain is pretty high as well.

But some deals are just too good to pass up.  As anyone who has read a single post here probably knows, I love the 90's.  So when a massive 30+ box 90's break was proposed on a forum, I was all ears.  I had done a similar break a few months back (which I still need to post...doh), and hit the motherload.  When the break was expanded to 70 boxes for a little more than the cost of blaster, I couldn't get that paypal screen up fast enough.

The break was a perfect fit for me.  I pretty much stopped collecting in 1998 and 1999. Even though I have filled some holes from those years, my commons needs alone made the break a worthwhile investment for me.  Anything beyond that was just icing on the cake.

And this cake ended up well iced.

The break had a pretty broad range of boxes, including a few top end boxes.  Nearly twenty years later, it's no small task to come across unopened wax from some of these products.  Some products that were widespread and had investor appeal, like Bowman, seem to be easy to come by.  But 1998 Leaf Fractal Foundations?  Not so much.  The product was pretty limited (for the time) to begin with.  And the cards are big holes in my collection these days.  Same goes for 1998 Donruss Collections, from which the Jose Guillen above hails, which were basically chrome and refractor versions of the primary Donruss sets released that year.  Donruss would be out of baseball later that year, but they put out some interesting products on the way out.

If you're not familiar with the products, I suggest a google search and preparing a flow chart.  They're some doozies.

But of course not all the products can be those upper tier boxes.  The price and rarity makes it tough enough, so many of the boxes were lower end product.  But that's fine by me, since the 90's were great for 1 per pack parallels that leave big, gaping holes in my binder pages.

Like these great '63 Throwback designs from the 1998 Fleer Tradition set.  Fleer would later use the design for their base Tradition set in 2003, but I'm preferential to the parallel version.

There was enough 1998 Bowman (I believe 7 boxes between Series 1, 2, and Chrome) that I hope I don't see any more in my lifetime - though I stilllll have some holes in the International parallel set.  But 2000 Bowman and Chrome were welcomed sights.  The Bucs slot largely struck out on the Bowman boxes, but I did come away with a beauty from 2000 BC's Retro/Future parallel.  It's still one of my favorite parallel sets.

One of my favorite aspects about a break this size is that there is something for everybody.  Some of the more expensive slots may have been disappointed.  But on the whole the break hit some bigtime cards.

But of course one of the biggest perks of participating in a group break is the break itself.  The break was streamed live across two nights, and was a great learning experience.  For example, I now know that telling Kate I'm too busy to do thing X because I'm watching a man open boxes of baseball cards on the computer is probably not a good choice.  It's also about as interesting as watching paint dry when the boxes are from the 90's, where a card numbered out of 3000 may be the hit of the box.

Speaking of hits, they come in all forms during a break.  Sure, there were some big hits.  And a few big dollar cards came out (though never in black and gold).  But as I said, it was the smaller joys, like half a dozen of 90's Pacific product that is nearly nonexistent in my collection, that made the break for me.

The flat rate box that came in yesterday had nearly 400 cards.  Sorting through all of them was a relatively painless process, since I knew which products in the break were my biggest needs and which I probably already had a good deal of the cards.  Some of the boxes were also repeats from the previous 90's break, so I knew those sets were probably already completed.  All told, I added about 160 new cards to the collection.  Not much more than a dime a card.  And considering that many of those were inserts or parallels, not bad at all.

The break yielded some fun cards that I just wouldn't be able to come by with ease otherwise.

It didn't scan well, but this 1999 Bowman Chrome International parallel of Jason Kendall features an awesome California seascape in the background.  And while not a super rare hit, it's also the kind of card that isn't quite rare or valuable enough to make it into a show box or ebay.  Yet hard enough to find that it's not just sitting on sportlots.

Oh, I had been promising hits, hadn't I?

Again the scan leave something to be desired, but this Paramount Platinum Blue parallel falls 1:67 packs.  Not a bad pull, if I do say so myself.

But the monsters of the break...

For the uninitiated, these beauties are 1998 Topps Tek Diffractors.  If that means nothing to you, these are basically the old school Atomic Refractor design on acetate cards.  But there's a catch.  Each player has 90 different patterns.  And the cards came in packs of 4 that carried an astonishingly high price tag of $4 or $5 a pack, which was insane for the time.

The Tek base set alone is an almost insurmountable task.  I think I have 3 or 4 patterns of each player.  But the Diffractors?  They fall about 2 per box on average.  Completing all 90 patterns for one player would be a jawdropping accomplishment.

These cards both came out of the box that was the highlight of the break.  A Diffractor hot box that yielded I believe 8 or 9 Diffractors in the box.  Talk about killing the odds.  If I wanted to sell them, these two would probably just about pay for my slot.  But I couldn't dare let such amazing cards leave my collection.

But the breakin' fun isn't over yet.  I went with the hot hand and bought into another, much smaller, break that just came in the mail today.  And the results were even better!

Flea Market Fun, Part 2

When I last left off, the first box of Steelers cards had yielded some unexpected finds.  It wasn't my first rodeo, so I knew not to have similar expectations for the Pirate box.  I am convinced one of the scientific laws of the universe is that exceptional box digs shall not yield Pirate finds equal to or greater than the quality of other teams' cards in said box.

Sadly the law held true.  But I saw still able to come away with a nice pile of Pirate cards that filled some holes.  As an added bonus, all the cards were in what looked to be relatively new toploaders.  Those things cost more than $.10 a piece themselves nowadays, don't they?

On to the finds!

Todays post was brought to you by Chromium technology.

The box yielded an impressive number of Chrome cards, including almost complete sets of 2001 and 2002 Topps Chrome.  I think I had a total of 3 cards from those two sets, so it was a nice find.  Better yet, the cards all appeared to be in almost flawless shape without any surface scratches or major wear.  Anybody who has handled Chrome cards knows how sensitive they are to surface scratches, and I've noticed very few Chrome dimebox cards come with the courtesy of a penny sleeve.

And while the fun insert finds were scaled back quite a bit in the Pirate box (the law, dammit), I did manage to pick up a card off my Most Wanted list.

2000 Vanguard was one of those sets that just felt like they were reserved for the hobby heavyweights, and these High Voltage cards took the cake.  Just look at it - it's electric (boogie woogie woogie).  I'll gladly excuse the horrid spring training uni on Giles and just appreciate the sheer design insanity.  Amusingly enough I have a few numbered parallel versions of this card, but up until now the base version had escaped me.

Speaking of cool Pacific designs, they sure did have a way of making cards look unique.

It's been nice to see acetate making a small comeback in the hobby.  On a base card?  Pure gold.

And of course the day wouldn't be done without finishing off a few set holes.

 It's always amazing that after probably half a dozen large Pirate lot purchases of at least 1,000 cards each that I still don't have what might seem like the most simple of base cards.  See my almost entirely barren binder pages of '83 Donruss for example.  But that only proves another hobby law: the easiest to find cards are the hardest to come across.

Speaking of which, after my dime box work and a total of $2 in purchases I headed back to the indoors part of the flea market and presumably to my car to head down to Game 4 of the NLDS.  But I made a detour to one of the card dealers set up inside whose booth had looked incredibly unimpressive on my last trip.

And this time, the hobby law was wrong.  But we'll save that for part 3.

The Streak: Loveable Losers Countdown, 10-6

The Bucs turned back into a pumpkin tonight against Andrew Cashner.  They looked lost at the plate, wasting a strong outing by A.J. Burnett.  Sometimes 2009 doesn't feel all that far away.

Anyhow, back to our main event.  We're getting into the good stuff.  Or bad stuff, depending on perspective.

10) Warren Morris - 1999-2001

Morris was a shooting star, rising quickly from College World Series hero to a very strong rookie campaign in 99, finishing 3rd in ROY voting.  From there, his average and power numbers fell off significantly.  He is one of my favorite players, and a super nice guy.  My dad took me to a free signing he was doing at a local card show back in 2000.  It was the first time I had met a pro athlete, and he couldn't have been any nicer.
It was a shame that his career tailed off so quickly, but for a while he made things fun.

9) Tike Redman - 2000-01, 2003-05

Redman again falls into the shooting star category.  He got cups of coffee in '00 and '01 before delivering a blistering .330 average in 56 games in '03.  But it was all downhill from there.  He put up a solid .280 average in his first full season, but his lack of on base skills and power made it clear he too would not be the answer in center.

I'll remember Redman most for his absolutely terrible routes to flyballs.  He would manage to cover more ground on a routine fly than anyone I've ever seen, breaking back before realizing it was a shallow fly in front of him.  Or vice versa.  Those years were a comedy of errors, and he was bringing the house down.

8) Joe Beimel - 2001-03, 2011

The pride of St. Marys, PA, Joe has a special place in my collection.  He graduated from my alma mater, Duquesne, before being drafted by the Bucs (and will be the last Duquesne alum to reach the majors, since they cut their baseball program in 2009).  He pretty quickly made the jump from school just a 15 minute walk from PNC Park to the actual field.

He made a nice career for himself as a lefty reliever, but unfortunately most of that came after leaving the Pirates.

7) Joe "The Joker" Randa - 1997, 2006

Honestly, The Joker could have made the list twice.  He was a fan favorite during his two stints in Pittsburgh, but was a very different player on two very different teams each time he was here. 

He came to Pittsburgh from KC in the Jay Bell/Jeff King Rebuilding Take I trade, and had a very good season for the '97 freak show team.  So the logical thing to do would be to leave him unprotected in the Expansion Draft, right?

Yep. 

So there went The Joker, off to have a very productive career for the next decade.

Enter the free agent spend-a-palooza that was the 2005 offseason.  Randa, Jeromy Burnitz, and Sean Casey teamed up to form the 2002 Pittsburgh Beer League All-Star team.  Randa started the season as the starting third sacker, despite blocking promising youngsters Freddy Sanchez and Jose Bautista.

But veteranosity!

Randa left the team to go on the bereavement list, Sanchez filled in, and absolutely tore the cover off the ball.  Joe never got his starting job back, while Freddie went on to win the batting title.

Yep, a true Pirate tale.

6) Doug Mientkiewicz - 2008

What Mientkiewicz had lost in skill he more than made up for in entertainment value during his season in Pittsburgh.  Before coming to Pittsburgh, Mientkiewicz had logged exactly one inning at third base in the majors.

He worked at the position in spring training in hopes of making the squad, and would make 30 starts at the hot corner in black and gold.  And he made some pretty nifty plays while doing so.

But the highlight of Dirty Doug's time in the Burgh was a screaming match with Randy Johnson where the two players had to be separated.  To say the Pirate teams of the late 00's lacked fight would be a grand understatement.  The teams were akin to a kid who would just roll up in a ball and take a beating.  Not simply not fight back.  But in fact just sit there and take the licking.

Doug brought fight and spirit to a team that had previously had none.  I was never a real believer in the whole "clubhouse leader" or "veteran leadership" argument.  Watching Mientkiewicz on that team changed my mind.

Simply put, it was awesome.

I Love the 90's

I've lamented this countless times on this blog, but perhaps the one biggest downside (for me) in the past two decades of losing baseball was that the Bucs were largely excluded from every cool 90's insert set.  There are fantastic sets out there that leave player collectors of the big name players from the decade still chasing hard to find inserts a decade and a half later. 

But even without the super insert goodness, there are some sweet cards from the 90's.  The players on the cards are just a little less exciting...

 Can you see why I'm excited about a new Pinnacle release?  I have found dozens of the Starburst and Museum Collection cards in dime boxes, but the Pirates always seem to elude me.

 Speaking of resurrected brands, I know people have mixed opinions on the new Leaf.  I'm not a big fan of repack products in general, but I have enjoyed the original products Leaf has released.  In a different hobby landscape, I'd like to see what they could do with an actual MLB (or evan MLBPA) license.  Perhaps some day.

Oh, these guys used to exist too.  Upper Deck had the market pretty much cornered on high end products since the late 90's.  Even without logos, I'm curious to see how their Fleer Retro baseball product turns out.  The set looked great in hockey and football, even though the Penguin and Pitt Panther starpower in the set have put the cards a little out of my price range.

COMC Pickups: All That Glitters is Gold

 Regular readers of the blog know I'm a big fan of gold bordered Pirate cards.  Perhaps a tad bit obsessed.  And card companies seem happy to oblige.  My recent COMC haul was heavy in gold, though pretty light in the amount of green I had to give up to get them.  All of the cards in this post cost me around $12 total.  Not bad, in my opinion, and it filled some tougher to find holes in my collection.

The first couple cards are less than impressive.  Rodriguez and Jaramillo were bench players for brief periods, and neither really amounted to much of anything in their limited opportunities.  Still, gold!  And refractory!

 Longtime Pirates backup catcher (and occasional 3B) Keith Osik is at least moving this post towards major league respectability.  I wasn't crazy about the 02 Topps base design, but love the look of the refractors from that year's set.  Unfortunately, I'm still a long way from a team set and copies seem few and far between.

 This Team Heroes parallel /10 set me back a whopping $2.  I was slightly amazed to see my offer accepted on the card, but I'll gladly take it.  Team Heroes always seemed like an underappreciated set to me.

 Ok, so I took some liberties here.  The card is orange, at least in name.  Still, the border looks more gold than some of what Topps has tried to pawn off as a "gold" border.

 The 1994 Collector's Choice Gold Signature cards are one of my favorite parallels from the early 90's.  At 1/box, these were a tough pull at the time.  Since then, I've found more than a few copies in dime boxes.

 No name players?  Yep.  But it's gooooold!  Again, for a couple dollars it can fill an empty slot in my binder.

 Ok, not technically a gold ref, but the yellow background makes it gold enough for this guy.  Morris was my original middle infielder player collection, though he was clearly supplanted in the collecting hierarchy (as well as on the field) by Jack Wilson.

(The Other) Opening Day

Opening Day used to be my favorite card set.  And when I say used to, I don't mean it has been somehow usurped; it's just not something I come across anymore since I stopped breaking wax years ago.  Opening Day just doesn't seem to find its way into card show dime boxes or even the occasional trade package (maybe the blogosphere will be different?), and I just can't justify spending $20 on a blaster to get one or two cards for my collection when I could spend that money to come up with a small bounty of far more rare Pirate cards.

But for a few years, my collecting brain thought Opening Day was the coolest thing in the world.  And in a lot of ways, it's the product that I have to thank for the beautiful monstrosity of a collection I have today.  As a kid, my collection consisted of the occasional trip to the local card shop's dime box (I still adore my 1998 Glenn Rice SP Authentic) and whatever rack packs my dad would grab for me on my way home from work.  But by the late 90's, my interest in cards had been replaced by other things.  Backyard football, pro wrestling, Legos, and the pressures of a 4th grade workload meant my cards were retired to their place under the bed and largely forgotten.

I just figured that like most kids, card collecting was a phase I had grown out of.  In all honesty, I think there is a very likely alternate universe where I become just another person who outgrew their interest in cards and gave them away to a friend or sold them at a garage sale for a couple dollars. 

But that isn't how things worked out.  And the thousands of cards piled, boxed, and bindered up around me wholeheartedly echo that.




On Easter morning 2000, I woke up to what was - and still is - a typical Easter morning for my family.  Ham and eggs, an Easter egg hunt, and my Easter basket.  Being an only child has its perks.  Inside my basket, amongst the jelly beans and Peeps, were a few packs of baseball cards.  I hadn't opened a pack of cards in two years (1998 UD Choice football), and my card-loving days were well behind me  I was a mature adult of 12 years of age, and well beyond my card collecting days.  At that age, two years felt like it had been a world away, some faint reminder of a bygone past.

And then I opened them - 2000 Topps Opening Day.  The design just seemed so crisp, the silver borders accentuated by the big silver, foil Opening Day stamp on the card.  From those 3 or 4 packs, I vividly remember pulling a Francisco Cordova card, his gray pinstriped road uniform fitting in perfectly with the card's design.  Thanks mom and dad, but I'm over cards.  Nothing to see here.  Move along.

As I spent the rest of the day pouring over every square inch of the cards, reading every mundane fun fact and stat line, analyzing the photos to microscopic detail, displaying a level of neurosis that seep into every sentence of this blog.

It would be too easy be too easy, too simple, to say the set brought me back to the hobby.  Before I was just a kid who had some baseball cards.  Who enjoyed cracking a pack of Collector's Choice during a trip to the grocery store.  In the two years away, the hobby changed and I changed.  I was hooked.  I was a collector. 

I asked my mom a few years ago why she picked up the packs.  She has an uncanny ability to always find great, and completely unexpected gifts, for every holiday.  But she undoubtedly knew I had little interest in cards at the time, and it just seemed like an odd thing to give me.  Her response was simple, straightforward:  "I needed something to fill up your basket, and I thought you might like them."  And as my parents spent my early teens driving me to card shows, stopping at little hole in the wall card shops on vacations, funding my collection, my collection grew, but so did the memories behind each of those cards.  So yes mom, clearly I liked them.

You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'

http://battlinbucs.blogspot.com/2013/03/the-team-card.htmlI think by now it's safe to say that 2013 Heritage is an unmitigated disaster.

Hideous design?  Check.  Awkwardly cropped photos because they were too cheap to get dead on head shots?  Check.  An assortment of irritating short prints?  We're on a roll.

Don't get me wrong, I'm sure the product will sell well.  I'm sure Heritage collectors will talk themselves into some half-hearted reasoning to justify building a set the way you justified your seventh grade girlfriend in hopes that you would get to second base.  And much the same, you'll probably find Heritage cheating on you behind the bleachers after school with Topps Fusion.

But let's not dwell on the Heritage set that broke your heart - after all, Topps Heritage and I had some good times together.  Sure, it's ending messy.  But that doesn't mean we can't remember what we once had.

You see, I first met Topps Heritage in 2001.  Ironically, I was indeed in seventh grade at the time.  2001 is still by far my favorite collecting year - I had just started seriously following the Pirates, my favorite company, Donruss, returned to the hobby landscape, a crop of red hot rookies had card companies cranking up the presses, and a series of retro-inspired products seemed like the coolest thing ever to pre-teen me.  Topps was in their 50th anniversary season, celebrating with a series of reprint and retro themed cards in the base set, Topps Archives and Archives Reserve, Topps Gallery.  UD and Fleer even got in on the action. 

But none could compare to 2001 Topps Heritage.  Modern players pictured using the famous 1952 design?  Plus a stick of gum?  The concept seemed brilliant.  It would seem quite a few collectors agreed. 

The set had a lot to offer, despite the irritating base set SP's.  I mean, how could you go wrong with a classic set like 1952 Topps?  The following years continued to offer fun, fresh followups to the initial release. 

At the time, the idea of owning an actual '52 or '54 Topps card seemed unfathomable.  Instead, these cards of my favorite players in those classic styles were the closest approximation to "vintage" at a point when a 1978 Topps Dave Parker/Rod Carew League Leaders was the crowning jewel of my vintage collecion (followed in a close second by 1987 Topps Sammy Khalifa).

The Heritage sets still felt fresh and novel; something old meeting something new.  The twists and turns to the set felt more quirky, matching the actual quirks to the original sets, than formulaic and predictable.  Chasing the SP's and few inserts felt like an exercise in recapturing baseball's past than a bothersome chore for the cranky completest.

I never attempted building the full set, but I imagine the feeling must be pretty similar to inspect and appreciate each card individually.  The products offered a perfect bled of old and new, offering just enough to the nostalgic collector, set builder, hit chaser.  Aesthetically, the 50's-style Heritage cards just look sharp.  Maybe the success of the line is less a credit to 21st Century Topps, and more a credit to the timelessness of their designer's during the Cold War. 

So maybe it shouldn't be a surprise that my enjoyment of Heritage started waning a few years ago.  The late 50's designs are among my favorites, but the sets felt weak.  We just didn't have that connection like we once did.  Heritage had lost that lovin' feelin', as the Righteous Brothers would so brilliantly (para)phrase it.


A series of decisions seemed to take much of the glitter off of Heritage.  The autographs became more common, as the autograph subjects became less than inspiring.  Topps removed the Chrome and Refractor parallels from the set, instead inserting them in a variety of weak Topps products.  The photography seemed to be phoning it in, using dull, uninspired photos that were often recropped versions of shots used elsewhere.  Still, I wasn't read to give up on what had once been a good thing.

And Topps gave me hope with the 2009 set.  The 1960 design is one of my all-time favorite designs  (in case you haven't noticed, I really enjoy horizontal cards), and the set include all of the features that made it fun.  The set felt fresh again.

But the releases since then have again felt uninspired.  With the exception of a few outstanding cards, the sets just haven't offered much that interests me.  Couple that with strong irritation from last year's Heritage High Number set, and Heritage just isn't a release I look forward to at this point.  And it certainly doesn't help that the next few years are, in my opinion, some of the absolute worst designs in Topps history (though I do like the '65 set), and it's not a good sign.  Of course none of this is particularly newsworthy - Topps has been going through the motions each year with many of their retro themed sets.  And as I said - set collectors and casual collectors will continue to buy them.  Until a serious decrease in sales is seen, we can probably expect the same run of the mill quality and effort behind Heritage as we see in most Topps products.

But at least we've got Bill Medley to make things better...