I thought I was going to collect this one

 I looked forward to 2020s Heritage / 1970s Topps for a long time. I knew the second half of the 60s and 1970 were not going to interest me enough to desire owning full sets with their plain designs and plain photography that actually gets more plain, weirdly/sadly enough, in the re-enactment sets Topps makes today. Even the wonderfully vibrant 1965 design couldn't get me to the finish line on the idea.

But starting with 1971 Heritage in 2020, I knew my interest would return. There would be a loving recreation of the epic Thurman Munson card, we all knew that. There was no way Topps would just abandon the tribute completely.

And in my very first hanger pack of the product, a wonderful respite from the craziness of the month of March, 2020, the brand new Gary Sanchez card confirmed my simple, set-collecting, basic baseball card fan faith in Topps, Inc.

Of course what I didn't know is that I would be denied a nice long baseball season of occasionally buying a pack and casually assembling a set, as Life itself went topsy-turvy in so many ways that baseball card supply was way down the list of important things. Aside from the out-of-nowhere virus news, baseball card distribution had subtly changed the year before, anyway. No longer would un-sold product be offered to me at a discount the next season. Instead, the astonishing quantities of baseball cards that my small town could not consume were pulled from the store and simply sold elsewhere as demand had begun increasing faster than supply even in 2019. But I was slow to realize this, particularly with just regular ole Heritage, a product that was always available to me, nearly 365/24/7 for a solid ten years straight before that.

The result was I just never obtained very much 2020 Heritage, simply because it wasn't in my local grocery store, bottom line. I just don't see myself ordering new boxes of baseball cards for delivery; if I'm going to do that I'm going to buy old baseball cards, not new ones - that simple. Overall that was probably better for me, and my bottom line, knowing that I could later just pick up some small portion of the set that I thoroughly enjoyed for way, way cheaper than I could effectively light money on fire by buying cards at the grocery store. Even though that is straight-up my preferred way to buy them.

That result just made me anticipate 2021 Heritage / 1972 Topps all the more. When it finally arrived, supply was initially spotty and subsequently erratic, but still orders of magnitude more common than cards in 2020 even if still unlike retail supply in the 2010s, and I soon owned several hundred of the cards.

I knew the cards would be 100% posed Spring Training Photo Day cards in the 'standard' cards, since 1972 Topps had the live game photo bases covered with the "In Action" subset. And I was fine with that, as long as something interesting came along occasionally, as with that Rio Ruiz card with the sprinklers still running full blast in the background. Has there ever been another baseball card with some sprinkler action on it? Probably. But I had never seen one before. And plenty of posed baseball cards can be perfectly enjoyable baseball cards, too.

I also knew there be no correlation between the color choices on the good ole 'Psychedelic Tombstones' and team colors, that's the way 1972 Topps worked. So the classic green&gold Oakland Athletics would look like this, which is also quite fine for making a colorful baseball card:

Now my basic apprehension whenever I see a good player on an Athletics card has nothing to do with Topps but rather is a serious problem in Major League Baseball itself, in my opinion. The A's are but one poster child of the current phenomena in the game. 

On that Montas card there is an example of a recurring phenomena in Heritage sets, with that just simply dumb backdrop sucking your attention into it rather than keeping it on the baseball player, though that could be just another of my many opinions. It took me many years of looking at cards like this to understand what that big 'ole black thing back there actually is; finally my regular conduit of MLB education, the radio broadcast crew I listen to for 120 or more games per year accidentally explained it to me. That big black square is an artificial "batter's eye" which is a feature of every MLB stadium design, to give the batter a neutral, uniform field to look into as he attempts to make contact with a 2.9" diameter baseball flying towards him at > 90 miles per hour. Spring Training ball fields don't have a stadium wall as part of their back fences, so they are constructed purposely.

Now as I frequently like to do, I didn't initially sort out my brand new 2021 Topps Heritage baseball cards into checklist numerical order. I like to understand who is playing where, and what they look like, and how a team works, as a team, looking at all the players on it at essentially the same time, which I can best do by sorting cards by team. That's something I have done since I bought my very first baseball cards. And while I didn't have a deep familiarity with what Pirates cards have looked like in the 2010s, compared to the instantly recognizable cards for the Braves, Reds, Red Sox, and Yankees (amongst others) based on the backdrops on those staying the same for a decade or longer, I was still surprised with what I found.

I don't think these cards need any commentary, really:

The run continued in the Short Prints, you know, the ones you get to pay extra for.

When baseball season ended and the High Numbers came out, the Pirates were still standing there

I knew I shouldn't, but I found the experience a bit astonishing. I have been commenting on this very thing for a long time now whenever considering Topps Heritage cards. The last time I had had this many Heritage cards at once, for the 1965 set, there were traces of same-same-ness in various teams, but still nothing like this. An entire team set with a repeated background - that is a very poor photo element to start with. The A's cards have this going on as well though not at the 100% level like the Pirates.

Now ironically I'm not saying the appearance of a Spring Training Batter's Eye Wall automatically disqualifies a baseball card from being very interesting. The Rio Ruiz card at the top of this post has one. And the very first card now finally 'leading off' my Rookie Card collection starting at 2011 Topps has one, also:

On that Trumbo card the basic 'cut-out' for Third Base and a few other baseball context things make the appearance of a Batter's Eye wall just another part of the ball park and the baseball card, which overall I quite like. And that card looks extra good mixed in with the rest of the action shots in 2011 Topps. It's when images just repeat, repeat, repeat that cards become hard to remember and just plain, boring.

This Pirates team set I had managed to see all together just killed my desire to ensure I had every single possible repeat of this same basic baseball card, i.e. finishing either regular Heritage or the High Numbers set. As it turns out, I had accumulated almost all possible copies of this same-same card, though Ke'Bryan Hayes has a comical "Action Image" variation card showing him posing in this same spot, since that widely collected very short-printed sub$set (more accurately described as a photo variation) was made rather moot by the "In Action" cards that are a part of 1972 Topps anyway. 

I also technically "need" 3 more Pirates from High Numbers (though any player in 21 High Numbers could have been photographed in Spring, 2021) and 2 of those manage to get the puke green Batter's Eye out of the card image while a 3rd is so radically different from any other Pirates card, in terms of background, that's now how to tell who has been traded/photoshopped in one of these sets, which is an odd way for baseball cards to work, functionally.

And one thing that I can't know here is - does Topps have any control over this? Do the teams dictate a quick hour or so for Photo Day, with a short assembly line process to get a basic portrait shot of every player, as fast as possible? Possibly at the very most convenient same-every-year spot selected by the ball club, and no one else? That might be the case. Looking through vintage sets (so easy to do with a complete database of every baseball card ever made at our fingertips at all times), it is clear that Spring Training photos weren't always produced this way, though some seasons and for some teams, yes. Other times one can tell that the photographer just likely wandered around for a day snapping pictures all over the Spring Training "complex" essentially at random. That is never seen in one of these new sets and the loving recreation of the most striking cards never amounts to a very high quantity of such cards.

Oh well. Broken record much? Nobody really cares about this in "The Hobby" because a fair portion of pointless / worthless 'base' cards are simply thrown in the trash, anyway, as they just serve as anachronistic filler included as part of the straight gambling that is a large portion of the real economic activity with cards. That's one reason that helps explains boring cards like these. 

I'll discuss a few more next time I scan some cards, as, not for better but for much, much worse, if you can believe it, Topps has discovered a way around this problem now. The next 2 cards I have scanned for you, well, I actually prefer those snoozer Pirates cards I just showed you.

Get used to these, as there are more where these came from: