I watched hardly any of the Super Bowl last night and I was trying to think of the last time I didn’t watch it.
My first thought was maybe 2015, because the teams were the Seahawks and Patriots that year, too (I don’t like either team). But this was when the Super Bowl was required viewing for my job. I was at the office and between 2002 and 2022, I was working during the Super Bowl. We’d watch the game at the office, then get the results in the paper.
So, my lowest-viewed Super Bowl had to occur before that, but it gets fuzzy. It’s possible I didn’t watch much of the Ravens-Giants in 2001 because zero interest in those teams, too. But it’s also possible I haven’t watched so little of the Super Bowl since the mid-1970s when I was just starting to get into football.
I began the Super Bowl last night in the kitchen washing the dishes (yes, that’s how much I cared). Then I went to my card room and started a little reorganizing that is taking place thanks to my downsizing (thanks to Jonathan for taking the latest round — hope I have his address correct).
I made a list of sets that were currently in binders that I could move to boxes. Then I moved the 2014 Allen & Ginter set (the most recent one I’ve completed) into a box and added the partial A&G sets from 2015-22 into that box, too. That was a good bit of condensing and I love doing it, too. One of my favorite downsizing jobs is emptying out the refrigerator (and my love for leftovers can probably be traced to this).
That former 2014 A&G binder will now be dedicated to the 2025 Heritage set.
My next project on Super Bowl night was to sort the 2025 Heritage cards that have been sitting on my rolltop desk in the order in which I obtained them ever since ’25 Heritage was first issued. It was time to get that thing in order and hunt for gremlins in the process.
Gee, can you tell I was doing this at night? It doesn’t help that Heritage card backs have been almost impossible to read the last couple of years.
After straining my eyes for quite awhile — I might have jumped into the other room to see Drake Maye get intercepted (wooo!) — I determined there were ABSOLUTELY NO GREMLINS!!
Those are the stacks by hundreds. The bottom right stack are all the variations, inserts and parallels and that is as tall as the other stacks and yes, this is an issue.
My 2025 Heritage set is not complete. It is one card away from being complete. That card is No. 430 — the Cubs’ Pete Crow-Armstrong.
I made the mistake of skipping purchasing it back in October/November because I was focused on another challenging short-print — Cal Raleigh — and I didn’t like the prices of either of them. But now the Crow-Armstrong is selling for stupid prices, usually between $15 and $25. Back in the fall you could get it for around $5-8 and maybe even cheaper. That’s how it’s been trending with these Heritage SP’s, too, as Erik Sadowski — the card at the top of the post — was the second-to-last card I needed and also difficult to find for a decent price.
This is only part of the problem. The other is that I can’t even set up a search for the card because it will include the bazillion parallels of the card that are also up for sale — the chrome parallel, the refractor, the pink sparkle, the blue sparkle, the green, the red, the blue, gold, etc., etc., etc. In order to find the regular base card you have to sift through a bunch of nonsense, only to find this:
So, what to do?
I’m probably going to wait it out for as long as it takes, though sometimes that can be the wrong move. I might just pick up a parallel and and slide it into the 430 slot and call it complete.
While I was doing all this (the game ended just as I determined I had every card but one), I was thinking about going through all this with 2026 Heritage. I know that it isn’t going to get any better. There will still be 100 short-prints to get and there will still be an increasing number of parallels blocking you from getting the base cards you need. The parallels in 2025 Heritage were out of hand and this is the obvious direction Heritage is going.
I wanted to try to complete ’26 Heritage because it’s still using designs from my childhood, just as 2023, 2024 and 2025 Heritage did. It’d be sweet to have that 1977 design complete, too. But aside from all the short-prints and parallels there are a bunch of “whooz-he” rookies that have been growing in Heritage, too. Just five years ago, there were almost no rookie cards in Heritage.
If I’m going to go through all that set collecting angst, I should just try to complete a vintage set.
So while I’m happy for the journey that completed those Heritage sets from the ’70s, I’ve made the decision to stop the completion task with ’76. Yeah, not getting all of the ’77 and ’78 design will hurt, and less so, the ’79 and ’80 designs. But my card money should go to other places.
So that’s what I did yesterday instead of staring at Super Bowl commercials.