A look at baseball cards of current Dodgers players in the style of the 1975 Topps baseball card set.
There’s another new baseball card set out this year, and it’s also an old set, in a row. This is the 2024 Topps Heritage set, which uses the style of an old Topps set from 49 years earlier. A few weeks back we also looked at Series 1 of this year’s regular Topps set.
This year’s old set is 1975 Topps, with the technicolor two-tone borders and block lettering at the top. Here’s a look at Shohei Ohtani’s first Dodgers card in a Heritage set:
The base set of the 2024 Heritage set has 500 cards, of which there are 15 regular Dodgers cards, plus another five Dodgers-related cards (featuring season highlights or former award winners).
Backs of the 1975 Topps set and, by extension, the 2024 Topps Heritage set, are laid out in portrait mode rather than the traditional landscape view we usually see for baseball cards. It’s a pretty simple set of statistics — at-bats, hits, doubles, triples, home runs, RBI, and batting average for hitters; games, innings, wins, losses, strikeouts, walks, and ERA for pitchers — but there’s also some sort of trivia question that is presented along with classic Topps cartoon artwork.
Gavin Lux got the honor of having a trivia question about him: “Who led the NL in triples in 2022?”
The back of Bobby Milller’s card asks a trivia question involving Don Sutton instead.
One thing I like doing with these Heritage sets is looking at cards from the original Topps set this one is copying, to compare and contrast. I tried matchup up a few pairs of cards based on some commonality:
- Smiling All-Stars and MVP candidates (Jim Wynn, a version of whose 1975 card is also on display on the club level at Dodger Stadium; and Mookie Betts)
- Dodgers catchers in action: Joe Ferguson and Will Smith, each during a play
- Two Dodgers Cy Young Award-winning pitchers: Mike Marshall and Clayton Kershaw
- A pair of starting pitchers rehabbing from Tommy John surgery: the original patient in this case, plus Walker Buehler
2024 Topps Heritage checklist
- 2 — Freddie Freeman (season highlight)
- 4 — Clayton Kershaw (season highlight)
- 116 — Bobby Miller
- 178 — Gavin Lux
- 187 — Emmet Sheehan
- 189 — Roy Campanella & Yogi Berra (MVP winners)
- 207 — Clayton Kershaw & Mike Trout (MVP winners)
- 211 — Cody Bellinger & Mike Trout (MVP winners)
- 232 — Tony Gonsolin
- 248 — Freddie Freeman
- 333 — Joe Kelly
- 356 — Will Smith
- 363 — Walker Buehler
- 371 — Shohei Ohtani
- 377 — Amed Rosario
- 386 — Clayton Kershaw
- 413 — James Outman
- 434 — J.D. Martinez
- 475 — Kiké Hernández
- 499 — Mookie Betts