I watched almost none 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 that year were also the Seahawks and Patriots (I don’t like either team). But this was the time when the Super Bowl had to be watched for work. I was in the office and from 2002 to 2022 I worked the Super Bowl. We watched the match in the office and got the results in the newspaper.
So my lowest-watched Super Bowl was supposed to happen before that, but it’s getting blurry. It’s possible I didn’t watch much of the Ravens-Giants in 2001 because there wasn’t any interest in those teams either. But it’s also possible that I haven’t watched so little of the Super Bowl since the mid-1970s, when I first started watching football.
I started the Super Bowl last night in the kitchen, doing the dishes (yes, I cared that much). Then I went to my card room and started a little reorganization that’s happening thanks to my downsizing (thanks to Jonathan for joining us for the last round – I hope I have his address correct).
I made a list of sets that were currently in binders that I could move into boxes. I then put the 2014 Allen & Ginter set (the most recent one I completed) in a box and put the 2015-22 A&G partial sets in that box as well. That was a nice bit of condensation and I like doing it too. One of my favorite downsizing chores is emptying the fridge (and my love of leftovers probably comes back to this).
That former 2014 A&G folder will now be dedicated to the 2025 Heritage set.
My next project on Super Bowl night was to sort the 2025 Heritage cards on my desk in the order I have acquired them since ’25 Heritage was first issued. It was time to get that thing straightened out and hunt gremlins in the process.
Gee, can you tell I did this at night? It doesn’t help that the backs of Heritage cards have become almost impossible to read in recent years.
After straining my eyes for a while – I might have jumped to the other room to see Drake Maye being intercepted (wooo!) – I came to the conclusion that there were ABSOLUTELY NO GREMLINS!!
Those are the stacks per hundreds. The bottom right stack contains all the variations, inserts and parallels and it is the same size as the other stacks and yes, this is a problem.
My 2025 Heritage set is incomplete. It’s one card away from completion. That card is No. 430: Pete Crow-Armstrong of the Cubs.
I made the mistake of skipping purchasing it in October/November because I was focusing on another challenging short print – Cal Raleigh – and didn’t like the prices of either. But now the Crow-Armstrong is being sold for stupid prices, usually between $15 and $25. In the fall you could get it for about $5-8 and maybe even cheaper. That’s also the trend with these Heritage SPs, as Erik Sadowski – the card at the top of the post – was the second to last card I needed and was also difficult to find for a decent price.
This is only part of the problem. The other is that I can’t even look for the card, because it contains the numerous parallels of the card that are also for sale – the chrome parallel, the refractor, the pink sparkle, the blue sparkle, the green, the red, the blue, gold, etc., etc., etc. To find the regular base card, you have to wade through a lot of crap, to find this:
So, what to do?
I’ll probably wait as long as necessary, although sometimes that can be the wrong move. I could just pick up a parallel 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 all but one of the cards), I thought about going through all of this with 2026 Heritage. I know it won’t get better. There will still be 100 short prints available and there will still be an increasing number of parallels that keep you from getting the basic cards you need. The parallels in 2025 with Heritage were out of control and this is the obvious direction Heritage is heading.
I wanted to try to complete ’26 Heritage because it still uses designs from my childhood, just like Heritage 2023, 2024 and 2025 did. It would be nice to have that 1977 design complete as well. But beyond all the short prints and parallels, there are also a number of newcomers who have grown into Heritage. Just five years ago, there were almost no rookie cards in Heritage.
If I have to continue collecting fear from all these sets, I’ll just have to try to complete a vintage set.
So while I’m happy with the journey I’ve taken in completing those ’70s Heritage sets, I’ve decided to stop the completion task with ’76. Yes, it will hurt if you don’t get the entire ’77 and ’78 design, and to a lesser extent 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.
#Making #decision