What I've been doing with cards

Note to Night Owl: Introspective posts don't work when everyone is off at a cookout.

OK, on with today's rambling.

Even though I've been pretty busy with my job this Memorial Day weekend, I have managed to squeeze in some card things here and there. So let's see what I've been up to. (I've addressed most of this on Twitter, so if you've seen it there already, you can go play frisbee, or whatever people are doing outside now).

I am in the middle of updating my Dodger binders again. This is something I do maybe three times a year. Some might consider it monotonous, but I like doing it -- a lot. What I don't enjoy doing is discovering in the middle of updating that I've forgotten some key cards, which happens ALL THE TIME.

It happens a lot to me because I pull cards for blog posts and then forget I've pulled them. I pulled a bunch for that face percentage post and totally blanked that there were Dodgers cards for that post, and then updated my binders without those cards. Arrrggghhhhh!

So I'm in the middle of updating the update -- grrrrrrr -- and right now I'm at the start of 1984 Fleer, the Dusty Baker card that you see here, which features a look on Baker's face that describes my mood about this whole thing perfectly.

So, let's skip this and go on to more card-collecting frustration.

I was able to get away to Target the other day (yes, I am living the good life) and instinctively stopped at the card aisle. There is nothing new right now that I care about, but Heritage is good when everything else sucks. And it was at that moment that I realized that I had left the Heritage coupon at home that I pulled months ago out of a Series 1 blaster.

This wasn't the first time I have done this and it occurred to me at that point that my baseball card coupons -- idiot -- should be in my wallet.


Without a coupon, I bought one of those Heritage hanger boxes instead of a blaster. It was a pretty good box. I landed the Dodger Jimmy Rollins card I still needed and a few other items. But I wouldn't have bought it if I had remembered that the boxes contain these:

These are the foil cards that replaced the red and blue parallels. I've never cared about foil cards in the first place and to include them when you also have the (better) chrome Heritage cards in the set is pointless.

But that's a pretty cool selection of pitchers there (Wacha and Kimbrel and probably Cueto are spoken for already. And, of course, out-for-the-season Ryu is mine).

P.S.: The Topps coupon is now in my wallet and I have exactly six days to use it. I'll try not to screw it up.

The coupon joins the two wallet cards already residing there. I thought this would be a good time to pull them out and contrast and compare.

Each of these cards reside in opposite ends of my wallet, in the billfold area -- you know, where the money would go if I had any money.

I think you can see that the Lopes card is more well-off than the Hatcher card, which just goes to show you how cards need to be printed on real cardboard.

Like many older collectors, I view Upper Deck with some resentment because of how it converted every card company's card stock into the slim index cards we're dealing with today.

Here are the backs:

Again, the '77 Lopes looks almost unblemished when compared with the '91 Hatcher.

Just in case the positioning of each card in the wallet is affecting each's condition, I've swapped where Lopes and Hatcher reside. But I expect similar results when I pull them out again in a few months.

Sorry, that's all you get for #walletcard right now. If I ever get a vacation, maybe Lopes and Hatcher can finally appear on a picture outside in the fresh air.

However, I was able to get one other card out in the open.

You knew that '72 Nolan Ryan wasn't going to remain encased for long in my possession.

I like hammers too much for that kind of nonsense.

So, one loud noise later, Ryan is feeling the breeze on his face:

Much, much better.

So that's what I've been doing with my cards the last few days.

This needs to be my full-time job.