In the quest to own every Dodgers card ever made, you make a lot of compromises with what you know as "a baseball card."
In general, a baseball card for me is a photograph of a major league player, background included, arranged inside a colorful design.
But there are all kinds of definitions to baseball cards these days. Bowman Draft, for an example, is a weird spin-off of what I know as a "baseball card." It does not contain major league players, for the most part, and in most cases it's filled with cards of players I don't know at all. It's also rife with Topps' version of alternate reality. Players often are photoshopped into uniforms they haven't worn and shown in front of generic backgrounds.
Take a look at this Connor Wong card, for example (and no, I didn't know who Connor Wong was until this moment. But thanks to 30 seconds of research I now know that Austin Barnes is the nephew of Mike Gallego). There doesn't seem to be much reality on this card. I don't know the stadium background but chances are Wong wasn't there, or the blurred background makes it look like there's more fans than there was. And Wong, currently in Class A, is definitely not wearing a Dodgers uniform.
I received several of these "alternate reality" Bowman Draft Dodgers from last year from Jonathan, the winner of my 2 million views contest.
Some of the names are familiar, some are not. Some of the uniforms are suspect, some are not.
But they all go in the Dodgers collection. And I'm happy to check them off the list -- although I'm not very good at keeping track of Bowman Draft wants.
Jonathan also sent a bunch of 2018 Panini Donruss Dodgers, just to make sure that I don't buy any more of these packs (there's that dopey Leaders in L.A. card again). I suppose now I really need to add a want list for this team set -- the trials of being a collector sometimes.
How about some random Dodgers needs? I'm pretty confident that those players did those things in that uniform in front of that background.
This one? Well, there's quite a bit of funny stuff going on around Green.
Jonathan also sent a couple of minis for the A&G frankenset binder. DeShields doesn't make the binder. Zambrano does, only because he kicks out one of those unfortunate A&G horizontal cards.
I also got a bunch of Bills (desperately need to figure out what I have with the Bills cards I've been getting).
Plus a couple of Sabres from the glory days.
And Evel Knievel!!!!!!!!!!!!
There was no fiddling with reality with him. He really did all that bizarre stuff. You never saw so many kids so fascinated.
And with that card, I'm jumping out of here.
Stay tuned for the next post. It's a big one.
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