2012 Topps Heritage First Look

I went to the local big-box store and bought me some 2012 Topps Heritage over the weekend. I bought 2 packs, 2 rack-packs and 3 blasters. I'm not planning to buy a hobby box this year so I was hoping to get a good selection. I'm actually pretty happy with what I got. I got at least one of all the easier to get inserts, and I pulled a relic card from one of the blasters. I got a reasonable collection of Phillies, Astros and Players I Collect. Here's just a small sampling of the base cards. I'll put up a post on the inserts later and I'll probably do a more extensive posting next week.

I've only have the cards from the packs scanned so far. This is the first card I saw. My first question was, who is this guy? He was a late call up by the Royals last season and appeared in 44 games. Topps has really been putting a lot of energy into producing cards of guys like this. No particular knock on Mr. Giavotella. He did hit .247. I can perhaps understand these cards in a larger set like Topps but the Heritage set only has 500 cards. That's not even enough cards to cover the 26 man rosters.

Floating heads! At least there are a couple of Phillies on it.

I had read that players who had changed teams were Photoshopped into their new uniforms. I'm OK with that but couldn't they at least find a photo they hadn't used before?

Another Illustrated Man in baseball.

I thought that the Topps Heritage set was supposed to based on a design from some past Topps year. If that is the case, why was this year based on 2001 Upper Deck Vintage?

Oh, wait, the design is based on 1963 Topps?

I guess that makes more sense. This is the only 1963 Topps card I own.