Completed set & master set – 2011 Heritage Minors

I finished the 2011 Heritage a few months ago, but recently I also completed the stepson of this set – the Minor League set.  I haven’t (yet) gone for the 2012 minor league product – I’m not sure I want to collect it again, and I’m pretty sure prices went down after release since there isn’t a Harper or Strasburg to chase.  There weren’t any inserts in this set, so this covers finishing both the set and my “master set” for this product.

Info about my set:

How I put the set (non-SP / SP) together:

202 (196/6) cards from my hobby box

44 (0/44) SP cards from an eBay lot

1 (1/0) card from a trade

3 (3/0) cards from Sportlots

Card that completed my set: #144 – Max Kepler (1 of 2 cards I got from a Sportlots purchase in early November)

General Set Info:

Set composition: 250 cards (200 individual player cards, 50 Baseball America All-Stars*)

* – The All-Star cards are all short-printed at 1 per 4 packs

Earliest active player from this set: #44, #239 – Mike Trout

When I’ve done this for other sets, I do either “last active player” or earliest player (meaning Ty Cobb played before Babe Ruth).  Earliest can also apply here – as in first player to break into the bigs.  I believe Mike Trout takes the cake here.  Trout made his major league debut on July 8th of 2011.  I’m not even sure how he was in this set because of that, but he beats out Matt Moore (who started the opening game for the Rays in the playoffs).

Player with the most cards in the set:  50 players have 2 cards because of the subset.

First Card and the Hundreds: #1 – Andrelton Simmons, #100 – Jaff Decker, #200 – Robbie Ray

Highest book value: #213 – Bryce Harper AS SP

The Harper regular card is even booking at more than any other SP’s.  This card books at 20 bucks right now.

Most notable card: #66 – Bryce Harper

Topps pretty much focused the whole set around young Mr. Harper.  As much as I don’t really like the guy, these are some pretty good photos.

Best card (my opinion): #173 – Matt Moore

I like a lot of the things about this card.  It’s a notable player, and I’m kind of a fan of Matt Moore – not sure why, I’m just kind of rooting for him to turn out well.  I like the old school socks to the knees.  And most importantly, I like the word “Biscuits” on the front of his jersey, prominently displayed on the card.

Second best card (also my opinion): #44 – Mike Trout (see above)

Best subset card:  #239 – Mike Trout AS SP (see above)

Either one of these cards is pretty cool in retrospect.  Considering what Trout turned into this year, and the fact that no one saw him coming up and just dominating the game.

Favorite action photo: #101 – Kellin Deglan

Catcher gear?  Check.  Diving to catch a foul bunt?  Check.  Crawdads as the mascot?  Checkmate!

Favorite non-action photo: #9 – Travis D’Arnaud

Particularly interesting given D’Arnaud was just traded to the Mets this weekend.  Not sure how he gets the Oakleys behind the mask, but this is a cool photo.  He’s wearing the same sunglasses in his All-Star SP card later in the set – but he’s batting on that card.

My Favorite Reds card: #129 – Billy Hamilton

The only player in the history of professional baseball to steal over 150 bases in a season.

2011 Topps Heritage Minors – Hits

To wrap up my posting about last year’s Topps Heritage Minor League – which was done in anticipation of getting my Heritage boxes soon – here are the hits I got from the box.  First up, the relic:

Arodys Vizcaino is the 40th ranked prospect in all of baseball – out of the Atlanta Braves organization.  He pitched in a couple of games last year as a September call-up.  Last year he went 5-5 at three minor league stops.  He actually pitched at every level but rookie ball last year – A, AA, AAA and the majors!  The 5-5 record is misleading – his ERA was 3.06 and had a WHIP of 1.134.

Next up are the autographs – which are, unfortunately, sticker autos. Other than that, they’re pretty nice, though.  No Bryce Harper for me!

This isn’t a list of top prospects by any means.  Dalles is in a catcher in A-ball who has never hit above .225.  Shuman is a reliever in the Rays’ organization who seems to have struggled at the higher level of A-ball.  Dakota Watts is also a reliever who struggled last year – he’s in the Twins organization.

This concludes my look at the Heritage Minors.  Tomorrow this blog will take a “rest day” – the first I’ve had in a while!  Then I’m going to start posts on this year’s Heritage set – which was just release!  I’m pretty excited to get started!

2011 Topps Heritage Minors – variations and parallels

Here’s the 7 tint variations I got out of the Heritage Minor League box.  Unfortunately – no Reds prospects!  Each of the 200 base cards has one (and only one) type of tint variation – so a full set would be all 3 different types.  There are 50 green tints, 75 red tints and 75 blue tints.  Each is numbered to 620.

I also got one black border parallel, which is about what you’re supposed to get.  Jake Lemmerman hit .283 in 2 stops at A and AA last year.

2011 Topps Heritage Minors – Scans

After posting about the opening of my box of Heritage Minors earlier today, here’s a look at some of the scans from the base cards in the set.  I’ll start off with the most notable base card from the set – Bryce Harper.  All the promotion around this set was for Harper.  It seems like they did this set just to get another product out there with Harper in it – since they couldn’t put him in the MLB sets.  We’ll see how he pans out – he seems like a punk if you ask me, but maybe he’ll mature.

Next up are the SP cards I got from the box.  I pulled 6 of these, which is what you’re supposed to get per the odds.  The SP cards are the last 50 cards of the set, so if I want to finish this set, I’ve got 44 more to go.  The cards are all a subset of Baseball America Minor League All-Stars.  The only name I recognized was Delino DeShields Jr., who was the 8th overall pick for Houston in the 2010 draft and is, obviously, the son of a former major league player of the same name.  Deshields and Foltynewicz both played A-ball at Lexington last year, but I’d hardly say they were All-Star!  DeShields hit .220 with 30 steals, while Foltynewicz had went 5-11 with an ERA around 5.  Kelly is a prospect in the Padres’ organization at the AA level after being traded by Boston.  He’s a ranked prospect, but his Baseball America number keeps getting worse each year.  Montgomery is a AAA prospect for Kansas City who struggled a bit after moving up to Omaha last year.  Sanchez hit .241 without much power or speed at Altoona – so

So the first 5 guys are hardly what I’d call “All-Star” caliber.  Yelich, on the other hand – finally a guy who performed like he should be in this subset!  Yelich was the Marlins’ first round pick in 2010 (23rd overall).  At Greensboro A-ball last year, he hit 15 homers with 77 RBI and .312 average.  He also stole 32 bases.

Back to the base set – here’s some of the more recognizable prospects.  Moore is probably the most notable to baseball fans.  After pitching well at AA and AAA last year, he got called up and started one game for Tampa Bay at the end of the year.  He then was the game 1 starter in the ALDS against Texas, and got 2 postseason starts, pitching very well and getting the Rays’ only win of the series.  Behind Harper, Moore is the #2 rated prospect.  Trout is the #3 prospect – he hit .326 and slugged .544 last season at AA Arkansas.  Machado is well known to Baltimore fans – he was the 3rd overall pick in 2010.

Next up are the Reds prospects in the set.  Devin Mesoraco was the 15th overall pick in 2010 and appears ready to be on the Major League roster next year.  After hitting .289 in triple-A, He played in 18 games as a September call-up last year.  He’ll get his opportunity this year, as Ramon Hernandez wasn’t resigned by the team.  Billy Hamilton is a speedster at Dayton – last year he had an eye-popping 103 stolen bases and a .340 OBP.  Yorman Rodriguez was actually signed as an undrafted free agent out of Venezuela a couple of years ago and has played decently at Rookie League and A-ball.

I talked about DeShields earlier; here’s his base card, and the card of another Junior.  Unlike his dad, who was a good reliever for Montreal in the 90′s, Mel Jr. is an outfield prospect for Pittsburgh.

Now we get to have some fun looking through the cards.  This dude’s card was my favorite picture – how does he get the mask over those Oakley’s?!?

There is some good photography in this set – here’s some more examples.  But my favorite thing is reading the team names!  Below, we’ve got the Burlington Bees – I really like the ball cap and the idea of bees on a uniform seems cool to me. The Frisco Rough Riders have some interesting history.  They are a Rangers affiliate that used to be based in Shreveport, Louisiana, and went by the name Captains and Swamp Dragons.  In 2003, they were purchased by Tom Hicks and moved to Frisco (which is a city in North Texas) and nicknamed the Rough Riders.  Just like the Rangers,the Rough Rider nickname is in honor of a US military division – in this case a voluntary cavalry regiment from the Spanish-American war.  Lastly, my favorite nickname is also a Ranger affiliate – the Class A Hickory Crawdads!

More fun with team names!  There’s Yelich again – he played for the Greensboro Grasshoppers last year.  The next two guys are Giants’ prospects.  Apparently the Richmond team is named the Flying Squirrels, and the Augusta, Georgia team decided to play off the city’s history with the Masters Golf tournament – they go by the “Greenjackets”.

More fun with names – the Modesto Nuts – who used to be the Modesto A’s.  The Sacramento River Cats – is Sacramento known for having a lot of rivers?  Magnuson had a cup of coffee in the majors last year – he’s 6 foot 7!  Finally, I may have some competition for the Crawdads as the best nickname – the Montgomery Biscuits!  They were apparently named after a n contest.ame that team

2011 Topps Heritage Minors Box

2012 Topps Heritage is scheduled to come out this week, and I have a couple of boxes ordered that will hopefully get here soon!  For the 2nd year in a row, I’m going to take a break from posting on the Lifetime Topps project to do some posts about the Heritage and Gypsy Queen sets when they come out.  This may slip over to Topps Archives, too, but I’m not sure right now.  Anyways, I caught up with a bunch of “completed insert set” posts in lieu of doing the posts for 1996 – so that’s where I’ll pick back up in a month or two.  While I’m waiting on 2012 Heritage to arrive, last year I did pick up a box of 2011 Topps Heritage Minor League Edition, and haven’t posted anything about it yet.  This seems like an appropriate way to spend the next few posts until I can get my hands on the newer, 1963 throwback set!

The 2011 Heritage Minor League set was the first of its kind.  It seems like Topps decided to capitalize on the popularity of its Heritage line and do a minors version of the 1962 set.

I loved the regular set; it was the first Topps set other than the base that I’d collected.  The 1962 set is one of the company’s most notable, and one I particularly liked because of its similarity to the 1987 set.  The box wasn’t super-expensive, and I bought it to help get over the free shipping limit on another box.  This set is a little different – but sort of fun to open.

I actually did better than advertised with this box.  I didn’t get any super rare hits, but I did get 3 autograph cards instead of the 2 per box noted on the front of the box.  I also got the one relic noted – I’ll post the scans tomorrow.

There are 200 cards in the regular part of the set – I got just under a full set of those – so that’s awesome on the collation!  There are also 50 SP numbers – these are all “Baseball America All-Stars”.  So 250 cards total.

Topps focused on the tint variations from the base set for this set.  Each of the 200 regular cards has a tint variation #’d to 620 – it just depends which color!  Some cards have a red tint variation, some have a green tint, some a blue tint.  There is also a black bordered card #’d to 62 – but no chrome parallel.

Bryce Harper is the big name in this set – he’s all over the promotional materials.  I got his base card, just like every other base card – but I didn’t get his SP card, though.  There aren’t any inserts in the set other than relics and parallels.  I think it would have been cool if they did one insert set – they could have done something with the stamps like they did in regular Heritage.

Here’s the box breakdown:

24 packs per box * 9 cards per pack + 3 checklists – 1 card for the pack with relic = 218 cards

1 double

196 of the 200 card base set (98% set completion)

6 SP cards

202 of the 250 card full set (81% set completion)

3 Blue Tint Variations

2 Red Tint Variations

2 Green Tint Variations

1 Black Border

1 Clubhouse Collection

3 Real One Autograph

3 Checklists