SPs

 Reading Night Owl’s post about his 2008 Topps Heritage set kind of opened a worm hole with me. I’ve never really been the kind of guy to put a set together by hand that wasn’t the basic flagship Topps set, so I never got the SP hunting fever like so many collectors have. I’ve opened my fair share of Heritage packs over the past 20 years, too. Until the last 2 or 3 years, I never even pulled any card #401 or higher from my stack of cards after they’ve been opened. I’ve just organized the cards by teams, and whatever SPs I pulled went into their respective team binder, and I was fine with it. It’s not like you can tell the difference. 

Maybe that’s why I don’t get all jazzed up about them. If you show me a stack of 10 SPs that has 1 base card in it, I couldn’t tell you which one wasn’t worth as much as the others. All of them look like base cards to me. If you go to a show looking to finish your Heritage set, you either have to flip every card over to see if it’s #401 or higher, or you have to buy them at excessive prices from a Brah who knows they are SPs and just has them in a display case with outrageous prices. If it’s an earlier Heritage sets, the SP numbers are all over the place, so you have to have a chart with card numbers, player names, and team names and hope you get lucky. Just too much work in my opinion. 

I’ve kind of been wanting to go through my binders and try to pull out all of the Heritage SPs. Reading Night Owls post made me actually do it. What good are those SPs going to do sitting in my binders looking like ordinary base cards when so many people are trying to collect Heritage sets and the SPs are driving them crazy. Why not list them by set and trade them to guys that can use them. 

That’s the big stack of SPs after I looked through binders for a few hours. Some sets had more, some only had 1, but I’m pretty sure I have them all out. 

I also got them from the 2 Allen & Ginter sets I purchased more than 1 pack of, 2010 and 2011. 

Here's what I've found.

2003

85 Manuel Ramirez

387 Eric Cyr

397 Jay Payton

11 Pat Burrell old logo

2004 

407 Pedro Martinez

413 Milton Bradley

423 Brad Wilkerson

434 Chan Ho Park

440 Miguel Batista

120 Frank Thomas old logo

2005

135 Alex Rodriguez

2006

10 Barry Bonds

95 Alex Rodriguez

281 Melvin Mora

284 Jake Peavy

315 Johnny Damon

317 Giants team

2007

22 Jason Kendall

140 Johnny Damon

186 Scot Shields

257 Aaron Cook

312 Red Sox team

356 Bernie Castro

474 Brian Sanches

2008 

430 Chien-Ming Wang

436 Ryan Freel

445 Kason Gabbard

484 Brian Roberts All-Star

716 Clayton Richard

Black backs

3 Eric Byrnes

49 Bill Hall

102 Moises Alou

175 Jeff Weaver

176 Preston Wilson

262 Hitters' Foes (Lowe/Penny/Billingsley)

266 Matt Morris

549 Jeremy Sowers

639 Mike Redmond

655 Angel Berroa

2009 

426 Scott Rolen

437 Zach Duke

705 Kendry Morales

716 Orlando Hudson

719 Ricky Romero

2010

446 Freddy Sanchez

449 Hank Blalock

2011

434 Carlos Ruiz

443 Brian McCann

446 Carlos Marmol

455 Joe Saunders

459 John Buck

482 Ron Gardenhire

483 Trevor Hoffman

2012

433 Rickie Weeks

440 Jonathan Sanchez

445 Gaby Sanchez

478 Roy Oswalt

486 Josh Hamilton

488 Ryan Adams

2014 

491 Yadier Molina

2015

449 Matt Harvey

707 Evan Gattis

2016

457 Nelson Cruz

483 Josh Donaldson

702 Aaron Blair

713 Aledmys Diaz

2017

708 Zack Wheeler

2018

465 Kyle Gibson

466 Mark Trumbo

472 Brandon Phillips

478 Eduardo Rodriguez

481 Lonnie Chisenhall

714 Anthony Banda

2021

455 Jose Osuna

482 Shed Long

485 Pat Valaika

492 Brad Boxberger

2022 

405 Austin Hedges

413 Caleb Thielbar

414 Jose Peraza

439 Tommy LaStella

440 Chad Pinder

460 John King

487 Chris Stratton

492 Chad Green

Allen & Ginter sets

2010

323 Angel Pagan

327 Vernon Wells

341 Jon Garland

342 Erik Bedard

344 Derek Holland

2011

303 Jaime Garcia

305 Justin Morneau

311 Ian Stewart

317 Brian Matusz

319 Jon Niese

326 Jason Castro

331 Carlos Gomez

338 Lance Berkman

340 Ryan Zimmerman

Ginter Code border

335 Jason Heyward

That's all the SPs I found. If you see some that you need, reach out to me, and maybe we can get a trade started. 

In other card news, I found a decent priced 2022 Topps Rays set, as well as a 2022 Topps Opening Day Wander Franco card. If I am able to find a 2022 Topps complete set at Target in a few weeks, then I'll have a photo variation card of him. I don't know if the complete sets will fly off the shelves due to Wander being in the photo variation pack and the flippers needing to eat. With the accusations of Topps having sham autographs, I'm hoping that it may get the flippers to stop hoarding packs and maybe they'll go back to living in their parents basements collecting welfare checks and eating ramen. At any rate, hopefully I'll get my hands on a retail Topps set. I don't really consider myself a Franco collector, but I'm kind of going after all of his base issues this year (kind of like with Arozarena in 2020). I am just missing his Bowman and Donruss cards, and that should do it for me if I can get that card from the complete set. Not too shabby.

Lastly, I did a post a while back about some former big leaguers who weren't exactly "lookers", but how they still managed to have a little luck with the ladies and have kids (and the kids happened to enter into pro ball). Well, while I was looking through my binders for the SPs, I pulled out a few of the father and son duos, and I'll be making some posts of those guys in the future. 

Hope everyone reading this who are going after Heritage (and Allen & Ginter) sets can use some of the SPs I found.

Thanks for checking out my latest post.

-Jeremy