When I receive a card package from a fellow collector that contains Dodger cards, there is a 95 percent chance that some of those Dodger cards will be dupes.That's just a fact of life that I made peace with a long time ago. I have more than 23,000 Dodger cards, you aren't going to get every card past me. It's just not happening.But if you are going to attempt to make sure that every last Dodger card that you send is a need, then you must do what Robert of $30 A Week Habit did when he sent an envelope to me recently. Every last Dodger card that he sent was new to my collection.How did he do that?A) He got lucky.With one of the cards anyway. The above Cody Bellinger insert from last year's Stadium Club had eluded me. But that's what you need as a fellow trader, luck. I don't know how many of the messages I scrawl that accompany my trade packages contain the word "hope," but it's got to be most of them.But that is just one card from the envelope Robe…
Well, welcome back card aisle, you're looking rather ... uh ... disorderly.This was the sight at my neighborhood Target yesterday. As disorganized and scattered as it appears, I can count three different baseball card products (four, if you add the MLB stickers) in just this small crop of the card aisle.This is as many different kinds of baseball card products that I've seen on area store shelves since March. With Covid quarantining and the inexplicable ransacking of card shelves across the country, I've purchased almost no cards in person for the last six months. (On Twitter I mentioned these were the first 2020 baseball cards I had seen on shelves since March, which isn't quite true. I forgot I picked up a couple of scattered packs of Series two a couple of months ago. That's how forgettable Topps flagship is this year).Within that frame are a couple of hanger boxes of 2020 Topps Fire, a half-filled gravity feeder of 2020 Stadium Club and, up at the top, a gravit…