A review of 2020 Topps Heritage baseball cards

The 2020 Topps Heritage set is out, which features current players but in the style of an old set. This year, the style is 1971 Topps, known for the solid black borders and lowercase letters for player names and positions.

For a look at the style from the original 1971 set, Alex Johnson is a good measure, with his regular card plus not one, but two cards recognizing his leading the American League in batting average the previous year, to date the only batting title in Angels history.

Since the Angels tabbed Andrew Heaney to start on opening day (back when we thought we knew when opening day was), let’s start with his card to kick off a look at 2020 Topps Heritage, a landscape layout.

The back of the cards are very brief with statistics, as was the style of 1971, with only the previous year numbers and career totals. Also included on the back are a headshot of the player and a blurb about the player in an info box.

The back of Dylan Bundy’s card has a hilarious case of selective end-pointing. In a year in which Bundy posted a 4.79 ERA, Topps is sure to note, “He ended the season on a high, sporting a 2.55 ERA in his last three starts.” Wonderful.

Albert Pujols’ card highlights the lowercase lettering, especially a standout for his positions of dh and 1b. Griffin Canning’s card has almost an arty feel to it, a nod to various older cards’ airbrushing.

We get a look at one of the variations of the set, with Patrick Sandoval and Matt Thaiss sharing the Angels’ “rookie stars” card.

The set is 500 cards, including 15 Angels cards. If you are a set collector, this is hard to complete by buying packs. The last 100 cards are short-print (not to be confused with variation super short prints or chrome variations), meaning there are far fewer of these available. I bought an Angels team set off eBay, but didn’t read the description thoroughly enough and didn’t notice the short prints weren’t included, which unfortunately means that, for now, I am missing the Mike Trout and Shohei Ohtani cards in this set.

2020 Topps Heritage Angels checklist

• 65 - Mike Trout (league leaders)
• 77 - Dylan Bundy
• 78 - Albert Pujols
• 99 - Tommy La Stella
• 152 - Matt Thaiss/Patrick Sandoval (rookie stars)
• 211 - Cam Bedrosian
• 214 - Griffin Canning
• 215 - Justin Upton
• 318 - Andrew Heaney
• 360 - Andrelton Simmons
• 375 - Hansel Robles
• 433 - Shohei Ohtani
• 463 - Kole Calhoun
• 466 - Mike Trout
• 485 - David Fletcher