It started a few months ago with a joke on Twitter about Night Owl, a well-known lover of 1975 Topps, becoming insolvent trying to collect the different variations of 2024 Topps Heritage (which will be based on 75T).
I did the proverbial LOL…
“Ha ha”, I laughed.
“Ha ha ha ha!”
…But that night, I had a dream that’s been waking me up in a cold sweat ever since.
In my dream it’s 2024 and I’m busting a wax box of that year’s Heritage; What fun! Wheeeeee!!!
Like Night Owl, I also love 1975 Topps… 1975 was my second year of collecting and the year that card collecting became an obsession for me.
Out of the first pack of 2024 Heritage I pulled a card of Francisco Lindor, who is a player I like and semi-collect. Yay!
Out of the second pack I pulled another Lindor, this time in a different color combination. Cool beans, a parallel!
Third pack, another Lindor another color combination…
None of this was surprising, there are 18 different color combinations in 1975 Topps. With the exceptions of All-Stars and certain subsets, the colors were assigned seemingly arbitrarily, a situation which lends itself to multiple levels of parallels.
By the end of the box I had 18 different Lindor cards…
Wow, they really went the distance with that, didn’t they?
That’s when I flipped the cards over to look at the “Product Code” so I could figure out which of the eighteen cards was the base card…
AND THERE WAS NO PRODUCT CODE ON THE BACK!
I started thumbing through my other cards… Fourteen different Travis Shaw cards… Eleven different Brandon Crawford cards… Nine different Pat Nesheks…. and no way to determine which was the base and which were the parallel.
That’s when I found out that each of the eighteen color combos were printed in equal amounts, so that EVERY CARD WAS A BASE CARD…. or NONE of them was a base card, depending on how you looked at it.
…and I did the math… 18 versions of 660 cards… A master set of 11,880 cards… and if you count the mini versions of each of the possible cards, that makes the master set total 23,760 cards…
That’s where I always wake up screaming.
After which I get out of bed, start falling, and run through the rest of the opening credits for “Eek The Cat”.
The Shlabotnik Report 
I truly pray no one at Topps is paying attention. If this happens, you will be held fully responsible! Utter and complete madness! At five years out, there is always the chance the hobby will suffer yet another crash…so maybe there’s hope. EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEK!
They’re gonna mess it up, that’s for sure. I just hope I can collect around the messes.
Please. Please. Please… do not give Topps any ideas!
Well I WAS looking forward to 2024!
1975 was also my second year of collecting soo………
Pingback: Tops Reads of 2018 | 1975 Baseball Cards
Aw, not to worry. That would be the Donruss version. Topps will only make one set – half veterans and half rookies, with inserts about guys from ’75 paired with guys from 2024, though the ’75 guys will be ranked 8th in the category and not relevant to the combo.
Here we are are! 4-6 weeks out from 2024 Topps Heritage dropping barring no delays, LOL. Any new takes on this?
For starters I did a terrible job of predicting which players would be active in 2024 :-D
I suspect that the parallels will be more along the lines of “white border”, “mini” and (hopefully) something along the lines of the 1976-77 Venezuelan Winter League stickers
https://www.tcdb.com/ViewSet.cfm/sid/119387/1976-77-Venezuelan-Winter-League-Stickers