Heritage from 2020 but not 2020 Heritage (well, one)

This week I received a few trade packages from fellow friends and bloggers, my first of 2021. Considering it's been nearly six months since I last saw cards in the wild, finding bubble mailers and card-filled envelopes in the mail is quite exciting. I'm still looking to get my hands on my first 2021 cards of the year, but an incoming package from a recent Nachos Grande box break should scratch that itch.

I'll get to the contents of those packages soon enough, but I still have plenty of trades and purchases from 2020 I need to get posted. So that's where we'll start. 

Topps Flagship and my PCs have been the central focal points of my collection since I started collecting nearly a decade ago. I'm steadily working my way through Flagship--I have about 55% of all Dodgers at the moment--and I'm always adding new cards of my favorite dudes. Last year I decided to throw Topps Heritage in the mix, and a large portion of the new cards I picked up in 2020 helped kick off that chase. 

Shortly after posting about my decision to chase Heritage, a few trades formed and lots of new Heritage cards quickly made their way to me in New Jersey. In fact, all of the cards you see in this post come from the wonderful Mr. Haverkamp, a blogging staple. 

Mr. Haverkamp found cards I needed from 11 different years of Heritage, though considering I had next to no Heritage cards in my possession upon this announcement, I suppose it's not that surprising. Let's take a look at some of the fun stuff that came my way (in random order since Blogger is apparently dreadful to work with when it comes to formatting images). 

Lots of fun stuff here. I don't miss the old team photo cards at all. It's tough to actally make anybody out and they're not particularly fun to look at. I prefer the team card treatment we've seen in recent Topps sets. 

Card backs don't get as much play as they deserve, so let's take a look at a smattering of those as well. 

I think the Darvish back is the easiest to read, but I do enjoy the few cards with middle names on the backs. What are your favorites? 

Thanks for the cards, Mr. Haverkamp!

Rarities

On May 23, 2002, Shawn Green had one of the greatest offensive days in baseball history. Green hammered four home runs (tying a major league record), going 6-for-6 with seven RBIs and setting the major league record for total bases in a single game (19). 

In 2015 Topps released "Rarities" and insert set in Update Series that chronicled Green's phenomenal perfomance.

But it's not the first card (and certainly not the last) to record Green's performance. Just take a look at the backs of these cards. 

These three Shawn Green cards came to me via Nick over at Dime Boxes, and they'll fit nicely into my Green binder. I haven't taken a look yet, but I'm sure I'd be able to find at least a few more cards capturing Green's four-dinger game.

Alongside the Green cards, Nick also sent along one of my Most Wanted cards: 2006 Topps Brad Penny. There's nothing special about this card, though it was one of the two cards remaining from the 2006 Topps set I was missing. With this added to the binder, I'm now just missing the Dodgers Team Card (#612)--it has been added to the Most Wanted list on my sidebar. 

Nick also kindly included a handful of Heritage Dodgers which I can now mark off my lists. The Connor Joe and Josh Sborz are new to my eyes (I've seen the Kelly and Barnes cards elsewhere on the blogosphere), and I had no idea these guys were even featured in the set. I find Joe the most interesting card here, as he's actually never suited up for the major league Dodgers. The Giants selected him in the Rule 5 draft last year, and he totaled 16 plate appearances up in the Bay Area, notching just one hit. The Giants cut bait and he returned him to the Dodgers where he played for Triple-A OKC for the remainder of the season. Anyone know if he ever received a card as a Giants player?

With the exception of the Lux, all of the above cards were sent via a very full PWE after Nick claimed Trade Pile #2. A couple of weeks earlier, Nick sent another PWE (equally packed with cards) which included one of the first Gavin Lux rookie cards in my collection (it joins his base card from S1). I dig the design on these "Spring Has Sprung" cards. 

Since we're on the topic of rookies, I had better mention this beautful Cody Bellinger from 2017 Heritage. I'm including this in my Topps Heritage binder, so I will definitely need to add another to my Bellinger binder. His rookie cards are priced fairly high, so I'm not thrilled that I'm still missing  three (!) of his four base cards from 2017 Update, too. I try not to spend too much money on modern cards, but I think I'll need to take the hit to pick up his rookies sooner rather than later. 

I'm much more willing to spend money on vintage cardboard, but with guys like Nick around I may be able to save a few bucks here and there. He sent me a few fantastic vintage pieces, including this 1968 Topps Game Claude Osteen. It's the first card from this set in my collection, and gosh does it look good. I've long been a sucker for floating head cards (I have no idea why), and the colors on this card are tremendous--not to mention they coincide with the Dodgers color palette perfectly. I had no plan to chase the Dodgers from this set, but that may change. 

A pair of 1981 Scratch-Offs also dropped out of the PWE, featuring Dusty Baker and Steve Garvey. I don't have too many Scratch-Offs, and the early-80s are still underrepresented in my Dodgers box, so these are a nice addition. 

My favorite card to come from these PWEs has got to be this 1959 Solly Drake card. Before opening up the envelope, I'd never even heard of Solly Drake. Though he didn't have a long MLB career, he and his brother Sammy were the first African-American siblings to play in the Majors. That's a pretty cool accomplishment. 

The reason this Drake card stood out to me, however, is becuase it is in absolutely phenomenal shape. The corners and sides are sharp, it's crease-free, and it doesn't have that sort of flimsy feel you get with well-loved vintage cards. I initially thought is was some sort of reprint, but as far as I can tell it's the real deal. 

I don't really care about condition on vintage cards all that much--send me all of your well-loved, creased, and ripped vintage!--but when a 61-year-old card feels as if it just came out of a pack, it feels like a bit of a rarity. 

Thrill of the Chase

A few weeks ago I popped into Target for a grocery run. It was my first time visiting my local Target since early-March and my first time spending substantial time away from the four-block radius around my apartment.

The Target was in a much better shape than it had been since my previous visit. Shleves were stocked, freezers were filled with food, and the checkout lines were organized and well-managed. This was not that case back in March during the nation's great chase for toilet paper, as the Target was flooded with hysterical people and not much else.

While my trip to Target was largely centered around restocking my fridge, I had ulterior motives. I very badly hoped to find some cards in the card aisle. Luckily for me, I managed to snag the last box of cards available...though it's not something I'd typically purchase. 

And here are the contents. pic.twitter.com/WYhjxtY8WT

— Alex Markle (@markle05) June 5, 2020

You might immediately notice that a couple of things from this repack have made their way into my prize pool for the contest I'm currently running, namely the 1988 Donruss hanger pack and the contents of the two Leaf Babe Ruth packs. 

It'd been along time since I last picked up a repack box, and I was hoping I might find some packs from earlier in the decade in there. No luck. I opened way more 2019 S1 than I needed to last year, so finding two packs in the box was a bit of a bummer. The 2019 S2 pack was welcome, as I'm still trying to track down all the Dodgers from that release (anybody have an extra Cody Bellinger 507 or Hyun-Jin Ryu 515?). That said, I didn't pull any Dodgers from the pack, so there was no help there. 

I've never been a big fan of Gypsy Queen, so I typically shy away from it on the shelves. It just feels like such an unnecessary set, and I've never fully understood its appeal. I did manage to pull a new Corey Seager card to add to the binder, so it wasn't all bad. 

My favorite card from the box came from the pack of 2019 Heritage. It's not autographed. It's not an SP. It's not a variation. It's a simple base card of Dodgers' reliver Kenley Jansen. I suppose the card itself isn't anything special, but it did finally prompt me to undertake another collecting goal I've been pondering for at least a year: collect all of the Dodgers team sets from Topps Heritage. 

I've historically been a player collector, but I've shifted away from that a bit over the last several years. I started my quest to collect all of the Dodgers from Topps Flagship a few years back (now the focal point of my collection), though I've never really chased any other sets (with a few exceptions). So now I'm adding another set to chase down, though I imagine it will be much easier and far cheaper to do so. 

I have added my needs (and there are a lot of them) to my Want List page. You can also access my spreadsheet directly here. I'm not sure how much effort I'll spend to chase these down, but my goal is to have at least 10% by the end of the year which is about 45 cards.