Shunning my card duties

 

Well ... not exactly. Cards are always on my mind, even if I'm not physically present with them or writing about them.

I traded cardboard success for family bonding success over the weekend. That's an even swap but you don't want to read about ducks and piggies. So I'll reveal the ugly card details and show some shoulder-shrug cards before getting out of here and refocused on hobby things.

 

I managed to skip not one but two large card shows near me over the weekend. This isn't my fault or anyone else's except for whoever decided that schools in this area would get this week off instead the first week in April like what usually happens (my personal vacations are often tied to school vacations -- and I cannot wait until that's no longer a thing).

 

To compensate, I stopped by a hobby shop in a nearby mall where I was staying and then a flea market on the way home. I managed two cards for my collection, one from each place. Two Panini-themed Dodgers, which is not a surprise from the card shop (the singles were about 75 percent Panini) but wild from the homespun flea market.

 

So I was eager to get back home where I knew cards that I truly understood were waiting. But first these things:

 

I've moaned about the morphing of Big League enough on here, so much so that most readers know I'm not buying any. Cards On Cards took the lead by sending these Dodgers to me. 

 

But he didn't know I was being super pro-active with 2024 Big League, making absolutely damn sure I don't buy any of it in a weak moment, and grabbed the non-SP'd cards from the team set shortly before Kerry's cards arrived.

 

 

Here are the ones that didn't overlap.

Big League isn't just the first main product that features Shohei Ohtani in a (photoshopped) Dodgers uniform but also Yoshinobu Yamamoto and Tyler Glasnow, too. It's very hit-or-miss with this set on who is on what team, and team checklists weren't the easiest to find a couple weeks ago. So Glasnow is a Dodger and so is Jonny DeLuca even though they went opposite ways in the same swap. I thought Teoscar Hernandez was a Dodger in this set, too, but that arrival must not have made the deadline.

So that takes care of the the regularly available Dodgers in 2024 Big League. I previously featured the Will Smith that's in the semi-rare tier (it still hurts my brain that all the cards from one team don't all look alike).

But I had to grab at least one of the other semi-rare cards ... and so did Cards On Cards, I guess.

I've got two, ebay sellers!!! Find someone else to show your wares!

Of course there is still J.D. Martinez and Max Muncy out there. And then there are the rare cards that I'll think about in a year, if at all. Oh yeah, and inserts. Do you get the feeling that this set isn't a priority?

The great thing about cards is there is so much variety that I never have trouble pivoting to something else.

As I told myself over and over this past weekend: The cards will always be there.