Heritage Shenanigans - Part 1: 2007 Heritage Wal-Mart el cheapo pack

First of all, I want to make it perfectly clear that I am not making any of this stuff up. The events that occurred in this and the subsequent follow up post are true, and have been reported to the best of my ability. Ok, on with the story.

Last Thursday, I had to pick up milk and bread at the store. We were totally out of milk and the plastic on the loaf of bread ripped without me noticing so now I had a loaf of crusty stale bread. I didn't really want to go to the store but I had to go to the store. As long as I was there I checked out the card aisle. The Wal-Mart I went to had recently remodeled the card section and added a few of the cardboard dispensers that Target has had for years. You know the ones, a tall cardboard thing where you can pull the packs out of the bottom and slip them back in a slot up top if you don't want it. Unlike the Target ones that have the product name and brand printed colorfully on the dispenser, these were generic and black. The type of cards in each dispenser was indicated by a pack of the product stuck in a plastic pouch on the front. One of the pouches held a pack of 2007 Heritage. I looked in the dispenser and saw that that was the el cheapo bin, filled with random packs for $1.49. Hey! Half price Heritage! That's for me! I looked through the box, found another pack of Heritage and cleverly replaced the pack in the pouch with some 2006 Series 1 Upper Deck that no one would ever buy. I already have most of the '07 Heritage set, but it was worth it to try to snag a Short Print or two. Here's what I got in the first pack:


Not much really. I didn't need any of the cards but I did get a Knuckles insert and a frogboy looking Clemens card. I get the second pack and noticed it felt a little squishy. Oh great, I thought. Some fool looking for a relic card bent up the pack. I opened it up expecting to find mangled cards and this is what I saw:

What.

The.

Heck???

This is one of those times I wished I videoed every pack break just to capture something crazy like this. Yes, that is 1987 Topps in the pack. No, I have no earthly idea how the hell it got in there. It came with real Heritage wrapped gum too, not fossilized chalky vintage gum. For a second I thought I had been teleported to 2036 which is when Heritage with a 1987 design is scheduled to be released. Here's the rest of the Jerry Willard card that was peeking out at me:

Here's the entire pack:
137 Jerry Willard
138 Roy Lee Jackson
140 Bret Saberhagen
141 Herm Winningham
142 Rick Sutcliffe
143 Steve Boros
144 Mike Scioscia
145 Charlie Kerfeld
146 Tracy Jones
147 Randy Niemann
148 Dave Collins

This is easily one of the strangest pack rippings I've ever had. Pretty awesome actually. I open a sealed pack of Heritage and get 11 almost consecutive cards from 1987 Topps. Card #139, a Devon White rookie, didn't make it into the pack somehow. How could this happen? My theories:

Aliens. Or gremlins. Maybe alien gremlins, but that's just being silly.

The pack I swiped out of the pocket was just a display model and was not for general consumption. It doesn't make sense that there was a stick of gum in there though, or that the $1.47 price tag that was displayed on a few other packs wasn't on the pack either.

Some unscrupulous person or persons bought up a lot of Heritage, took out the cards, refilled the packs with junk and resealed them before selling them to a wholesaler.


If you compare the bottom edges of the two packs above, the top one (the one with the '87's in it) has kind of a scrunched up edge and there's a line going across the seam. The bottom one is flat and has no line. The scan sucks, but I'll work on that for tomorrow's post.

So what do you think? Alien gremlins or wholesaler shenanigans? There's more to come in tomorrow's post... but in the meantime, watch those repacks, kids.

Roy Lee sez:

You got punk'd fool!