Night Owl Cards

  The bit-by-bit, card-here, card-there strategy of adding to my collection the first couple of months of the year continues for just a couple more weeks.   But you can accomplish a lot even when cards are just trickling in. Just the other day I completed the gold parallel team set for the 2008 Topps Dodgers.   No, that doesn't include the Update set, the Kershaw is still out there (I landed more than a couple of the Kershaw rookie, along with the gold-letter version back in 08-09, but the goldie eluded me when his cards were cheap).   But this feels like an accomplishment to me. I honestly don't know if I've completed the gold parallels for any of the other Dodgers team sets since gold parallels became a thing. So I decided to try to finish a few of them, beginning with some of the easier ones. 2008 falls into that category.   I had a lot of them already -- wow was I accumulating Dodgers like mad in '08 and '09 -- so I needed just six more. In order, I added Derek

  The excitement over the selection of the most recent Baseball Hall of Fame class has passed, but I haven't addressed it with my usual Hall of Fame update yet. I'll cite the usual laziness and busyness. There are four more people to add to the list of the most Hall of Famers for each Topps flagship set -- Adrian Beltre, Todd Helton, Joe Mauer and Jim Leyland. Also, I always find more sets to include in the rundown and this time I'm finishing off the 1950s. I also take the opportunity of the most recent class to update sets in which those inductees appeared. These are all recent guys in this class so the sets I'm adding this time are 1999, 2014 and 2015 (the sets Leyland appeared in I've covered already). Once I'm finished with this update, there will be just one more update to go! I've been doing these for more than 10 years so I'll be happy to cut back on this -- though I'll have to update one a year when a new class is elected. All right, here we