Heritage High Number and Collecting 2024....I'm back baby!

 

I don’t know what happened this past fall.

                Acute anxiety and the general doldrums are two of the culprits.

                But I just wasn’t feeling it with cards. I wasn’t feeling it as a collector. I felt scattered and all over the place. From October 2023 to this past Saturday, I think I bought a box of 2023 Update (vastly over-rated) and a few Archives singles from Pirates and other players that I collect.

                …and that was it.

                I’ve spent the time trying to figure out what made me turn away, especially considering I was feeling a lot of anxiety in other aspects of my life. I got back into cards in 2019 to help me COPE with my anxiety. Were they no longer working? Had my anxiety gotten that bad again? Or was I being a cheapskate, as I often am. Was there simply no card product out there that I was remotely interested in? Oh, God, was I just one of those dudes who jumped back into the Hobby for a little bit, predating the Covid dudes by just a few months?

                It was a little bit of everything.

                Except the Covid dude part.

                I’m not looking to make a profit with cards.

                I’m looking for enjoyment.

                Why wasn’t I enjoying?

                I didn’t have the answers. But as the year waned, and I started thinking about 2024, the new baseball season, etc.; I started to feel that itch. That Itch to buy cards. That itch to rip packs.

                So, I made my first card purchase of the season.

                Yeah…I know…wow.

                But it was wow enough to me that I spent a Sunday morning ripping packs and collating the High Number set, drinking coffee and listening to Ryan Adams albums. It felt good being back in the room where I store my cards. I’d been in there so infrequently the past so many weeks. Felt good to mess with the collection again. Felt good to think about the kind of collector I really want to be.

                And I’ve narrowed that down to five things

1.       Topps Base and Heritage set building

2.       Pittsburgh Pirates cards and all that entails: team sets, PCs etc.

3.       Pittsburgh Steeler cards and all that entails.

4.       PCs for other players that I collect.

That’s not too far from what I’ve been doing, but I want it to be a focus; especially building Pirates and Steeler player PCs, and team sets for as far back as my honest dollar will go. And I’m going to try and keep this blog regular. At least a couple of times I month.

Anyway…here are the highlights from the two Heritage High Number boxes:

Got a big Oneil Cruz, which I hope symbolizes the big comeback year he’s going to have.

(Realize now I should've put the regular Cruz card next to it...perhaps an image update)

I loath the Atlanta Braves. Have since I was 17 years old. I don’t collect any Braves players from my childhood and teen years, and I don’t collect any of them playing now. Not even Acuna.

But I collect one Brave.

I genuinely love these inserts and might try to get them all.

Got my proverbial “hits”

Apparently, there are card images in reverse, of which Mr. Volpe showed up again.

Ugh…and I did one thing with this year’s Heritage (I’m talking the Low Numbers here) that I haven’t done with the others sets I’m still working on…I put them in binders.

And then Topps did this.

Yep…that’s a few hundred cards I now have to shift.

Overall, I like this year’s Heritage.  I do wish that Topps would stop with the SP cards, considering we’ve reached 1974 when sets were brought out as one and not in series that became scarce because no one bought enough of them at the time. I also wish that Topps would stop treating Heritage High Number as Series 2 and Update. I think most Heritage collectors are doing it for nostalgia purposes, so we’re well-versed in not seeing players in their new uniforms until the following season’s cards. It’s okay to just focus on players you haven’t made cards of yet.

But those are minor complaints.

And I’m glad this malaise or whatever it was with collecting, has kind of burned off of me.

I’m glad I’m not a Covid collector dude.