Players with the most cards in my collection

 

 

With the cards I received from Sportscards From The Dollar Store that I blogged about yesterday, Cody Bellinger stepped into 25th place on the list of the players with the most cards in my collection.

 

I've long wanted to know collection highlights like who has the most cards and such. For the many years that I was inventorying my collection, I dreamed of being able to spit back numbers like that on the off-chance anyone would ask and then award me with a cash prize.

 

The inventorying of my total collection is still going on, but I mentioned that I completed accounting for all the cards of individual baseball players in my collection a couple of months ago. And last night I figured out which players had the most cards sitting my card room.

 

I knew that all of the players with the most would be Dodgers. I've never considered myself a player collector -- and that's what makes an exercise like this interesting because I'm not controlling the puppet strings, so to speak -- but I'm definitely a team collector.

 

So, therefore, all but one player who has accumulated triple figures in my collection have played for the Dodgers. I'll show the lone player who hasn't at the end.

Bellinger's arrival in the top 25 is significant because he's appeared on cards only since 2017. That's how many cards Topps and Panini are making of the superstar players these days.

Let's go through the top 25 in reverse order.

25. Cody Bellinger - 182 cards

24. Brett Butler - 185 cards

23. Duke Snider - 187 cards

22. Yasiel Puig - 199 cards

21. Adrian Gonzalez - 203 cards

19 and 20. Chad Billingsley and Corey Seager - 205 cards

18. Sandy Koufax - 220 cards

17. Eric Gagne - 221 cards

15 and 16. Ramon Martinez and Gary Sheffield - 245 cards

14. Russell Martin - 246 cards

13. Chan Ho Park - 263 cards

12. Kevin Brown - 269 cards

11. Andre Ethier - 288 cards

Now, before we hit the top 10, a couple of notes:

You should be able to notice the unreal number of cards produced in the late 1990s/early 2000s in the list of players I just typed.

In other words, I have never actively added a card of Kevin Brown or Chan Ho Park to my collection, meaning I have never specifically purchased one. They have all landed in my collection through trades for Dodger cards. And since Brown and Park both played for the Dodgers during that magically weird period at the turn of the century, they have way too many cards.

The same goes for Gary Sheffield and a few guys we'll see in a minute.

Meanwhile, there is some indication above that I did actively recruit certain players to my collection. There were periods when I really wanted cards of Russell Martin, Andre Ethier and Yasiel Puig.

Note that Corey Seager is already tied for 19th and he's been appearing in major issues only in the last five years.

OK, time for the top 10:

10. Orel Hershiser - 292 cards

One of five players that appears on a specific page on the blog advertising that I collect these guys, although, again, I do not make obtaining his cards as one of my top collecting goals. I don't play like that.

All but three of the 292 cards are Dodger cards. Hershiser is also the only player in the top 10 whose career is rooted in the 1980s.

 

9. Jackie Robinson - 304 cards

I've mentioned this a bunch of times already but the percentage of Robinson cards created while he was playing that are in my collection is tiny compared with the total number of Robinsons. In other words, 2 of the 304 cards I have were made in the 1950s.

 

8. Adrian Beltre - 334 cards

No doubt in my mind that if Beltre had stayed with the Dodgers for his whole career, or even most of his career, that he would be in the top three in my collection. Heck, he may have ended up as my favorite player ever with the most cards.

7. Raul Mondesi - 369 cards

Mondesi was my favorite player during the mid-1990s. I wasn't collecting cards then. Imagine if I was.

6. Eric Karros - 424 cards

Like Brown, Park and Sheffield, I've never actively sought after Eric Karros cards. But when enough cards are created of a player to start an avalanche, you're going to end up with a few.

5. Matt Kemp - 426 cards

I was a big Kemp fan around 2010-12 and that synced up well with so many Kemp cards produced in that period. I was happy to get as many as I could.

4. Shawn Green - 440 cards

An unreal number of cards created of Green during his Dodger days.

3. Hideo Nomo - 531 cards

If I was specifically a player collector, I know I would have more Nomo cards than of any other player. That's because the amount of Nomo cards created, so I'm told, could clothe every person in the world.

2. Mike Piazza - 587 cards

It took a long time for the No. 1 guy on the list to put Piazza in the rear view mirror. Piazza's card catalog is immense. Playing in the late '90s and playing for the Dodgers and the Mets will do that.

1. Clayton Kershaw - 761 cards

No surprise to me and I'm sure no surprise to some readers.

That's not even the correct total. There are a few new Kershaws on the card desk that I haven't inventoried yet.

So, that's the players with the most cards in my collection.

Ideally, the players with the most cards would be my favorite players of all-time. But they just didn't make gobs and gobs of cards in the '70s like they did in the past three decades.

Ron Cey, my all-time favorite player, is in 38th place at 140 cards, trailing players who I am much less fond of, such as Jeff Kent, Kenley Jansen and James Loney.

I could do something about that, I suppose, and just get rid of the cards of the players I don't like as much. But my collection is much more about sets and a team than individual players.

The one player in triple-digit figures in my collection who never played for the Dodgers has 118 cards, which probably would be around 60th on the list (I haven't tallied beyond the top 40 or so).

It's Nolan Ryan.

 

I've accumulated so much because his career was so long and because it lasted through the '70s and '80s, which is my favorite collecting period.

 

The second-highest total for a player who didn't compete with the Dodgers is George Brett with 98 cards.

 

It's great fun to know exactly how many cards I have of each player and I hope to calculate other aspects of my collection in future posts. And there's still that matter of determining the grand, grand total ...