2012 Topps Heritage Minor League Baseball Box Break Recap and Review

2012 was a great year for Minor League Baseball and continues to be going strong with the start of the Arizona Fall League that boasts past participants like Derek Jeter, Mike Piazza, Nomar Garciaparra, Shawn Green, Todd Helton, Albert Pujols, Roy Halladay, and Ryan Howard to name a few.  Now in its second year, 2012 Topps Heritage Minor League Baseball offers collectors a unique release, unlike Pro Debut or any of the Bowman line.  With it's modest price, great base set and the chance for some really nice hits, Heritage Minor League is a solid set and a great purchase for fans of the MiLB, set builders and prospectors.

This set falls under our classification of trading cards.  Hobby Boxes contain 24 – 9 card packs and feature two autograph cards and one relic card.

Here is a look at some of the cards we pulled.

Base Set

 Gerrit Cole, front and back

Billy Hamilton, Dylan Bundy 

Archie Bradley, Miguel Sano, Francisco Lindor  

Cory Spangenberg, Jameson Taillon, Jurickson Profar 

Nick Castellanos, Gary Brown, Rymer Liriano 

Aaron Hicks, Danny Hultzen, Tyler Skaggs 

 High Number SPs

 Dante Bichette Jr., Javier Baez

 Anthony Gose, Tyler Thornburg

Black Bordered Parallels

 Chris Heston, Archie Bradley, Adam Morgan

Prospect Performers

 Nick Castellanos, Danny Hultzen, Manny Machado

 Francisco Lindor, Rymer Liriano, Christian Yelich

The Hit

 Tyler Thornburg Minor League Hat Logo Patch Redemption 

 Tevin Nash, Sebastian Valle

Overall Look

Same design as this year’s Heritage, which is based on 1963 Topps Baseball cards.  The photography is excellent.  The SP photo variations are much easier to detect compared to the MLB version of Heritage.  Prospect Performers is a great idea for an insert set but falls short on the occasions when the player’s same exact photo as their base card is used.  The hat logo cards are a nice addition this year.  Gone this year are the Heritage specific SPs of last year like the tint cards, which are not missed.  Again this year the auto cards seemed to have been designed for on-card autos, but the clear stickers work well.  Next year if stickers are used again, instead of their placement areas being a plain white oversized box, some finesse with the design would be appreciated.

Quality and Variety of Players.

Base cards here are 200 in number, but with some of the finer players in the SP range, you really have to call it a 225 base car set.  As mentioned before, this year in the minors was fantastic so there are a lot of quality players to be had here.

Do the hits hold up?

This is a really nice group of hits here.  Getting Billy Hamilton to sign more than just his short numbered relic cards would have been enough to vault this set to near perfection after his record setting 155 stolen bases this season.  But that is a minor consideration with the addition of the Minor League Hat Logo relic cards, the full game-used item redemptions and the Make Your Pro Debut promotion that give you a chance to win a one day contract with the Double A Corpus Christi Hooks and your own Topps card in next year’s release.  If it was Topps intent, an I think it was, to prevent pack searchers from easily detecting the Hat Logo cards by making them redemptions, it is much appreciated and a great move on their part. 

Will you want to collect them all? 

Set builders will find this very collectable. If you have a minor league team in your back yard, these cards are great for autograph hunters.  The SP cards add just enough of a chase element to make this one you will want to collect to completion.

Rating 

4 1/2 out of 5

2012 Topps Heritage Minor League Baseball is a must collect for fans of Minor League Baseball and regular collectors looking to get an early jump on some up and coming prospects..


Review box provided by Topps