TCMA oddballs are the bestest oddballs

I received a care package from Commish Bob at The Five Tool Collector a couple of weeks ago. I think he's giddy about the O's being in the playoffs because with the exception of Andre here and a couple of others, the package was filled with oddballs!

Here, take a look at this:

It's a Korean night card! Woooooo!

Please don't make me tell you more than that the card is from 2010. I have no time for research today.

Also included was the 1989 Dodgers Police set, which is one of the team's police sets for which I didn't have a representative.

Now I've got the whole thing!

This set, of course, is important because it came out the year after the Dodgers won the World Series. So most of your favorite 1988 Dodgers are included.

But since it came out in 1989, it tried to reflect the '89 Dodgers as much as possible. That's why there's a Willie Randolph card but not a Steve Sax card, because the '88 L.A. second baseman Sax departed.

This set fills a hole in my collection, but it wasn't the best part of the package.

This was the best part of the package.

Oh, I know you've seen this Jackie photo at least on 100 other cards. But have you seen it this big?

That gives you the idea of the size.

They're postcard-sized cards, maybe even a little larger, and they're from TCMA, issued in 1982.

I had no idea that TCMA produced cards this large. I guess I was too focused on items that were 2 1/2-by-3 1/2 when I was a kid and TCMA was doing its thing.

Here are the others:

The ones with the names at the bottom are actually from 1984. I don't like those quite as much as the '82s, but it's still nice to have my '50s and '60s Dodgers heroes in almost life-size form.

Each of the backs also contain this enjoyable little quirk:

Floating heads!

Plus you can't beat "he was forced to restrain the tempests of his fiery competitive spirit" for writing on the back of a baseball card.

TCMA is right up there in terms of the size of giddiness I feel when acquiring baseball cards. But do these cards beat Kellogg's in terms of oddballs?

Probably not. But that's only because I wasn't pulling TCMA cards out of cereal boxes. TCMA's were always stationed so far away that I had to view them in a black-and-white catalog and wait six weeks for them to arrive.

But I'm telling you, if those TCMA cards were in cereal boxes ... we'd be talking an entire blog devoted to TCMA.

Which reminds me, I really need to make my own cereal and then put my own baseball cards in the boxes.