The baseball card release calendar Topps has followed includes a few standards. Series One arrives just before players first report for spring training followed within a few weeks by Heritage and Opening Day.
All three of those products do contain inserts like autographs and relics but are much more geared toward set builders rather than those looking for hits. And then sometimes you get issues such as Topps Heritage Minors.
Any issue which has only a few cards of guys currently in the majors (and none when the cards were actually in production) is even trickier in terms of issuance. In reality, the best time for Heritage Minors to join the marketplace would seem to be August because the minor league seasons are still going strong and football season has not begun. The owner of Triple Cards in Plano told me that while his collectors liked Heritage Minors and put together their sets, he thinks the sales would have been even stronger if the set had come out a month earlier.
Now granted his store is about 15 minutes from where the Frisco Roughriders play and these cards, based on the 1966 Topps design, are perfect for in-person signing.
The shop sold about three cases at $74.25 per box while leading online retailers are currently at $60-65 before shipping. Each box contains 24 packs with 9 cards per pack and Topps promises two autographs (both of ours were stickers) and one relic card.
Here’s what we pulled from the box we received from Topps:
Base Cards: 191 of 200 with one duplicate. We did not notice any pose variations, gum stained backs or other shorter printed cards in our box
Short Prints (4 of 25 on the checklist): Josh Bell, Tyler Beede, Tyler Kolek, Hunter Renfroe
Blue Parallels: Marquez Smith/D.J. Peterson/Kris Bryant LL; Trey Supak; Alex Verdugo
Orange Parallel (#d to 25): Gary Sanchez
Minor Miracles: Cody Scarpetta; Lucas Sims; Robert Stephenson
Road to the Show: Orlando Arcia, J.D. Davis, Grant Holmes; Domingo Leyba; Sam Travis; Julio Urias
Clubhouse Collection Relic: Byron Buxton
Autographs: Danny Burama, Joey Curletta
Curletta has made it up to AA at age 21, albeit for a brief time, so there is some future hope for him. And if he does break through then our box is certainly better than it is today. But as noted, most people who opened these boxes at Triple Cards were happy to put their sets together and follow these guys as they try to make ‘the show’. If they received some good hits, that was an added bonus.
The short print checklist includes Miguel Sano, Corey Seager and Aaron Nola, among others, so building a set with the SPs adds to the cost but it’s not an impossible task.
You can see 2015 Topps Heritage Minors on eBay here.
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