My patience is wearing thin

 

I complain a lot on here about how little patience people have these days -- from MLB insisting on artificially shortening games to Twitter feeding the release beast as Topps, Panini, etc., churn out new product every day for a panting audience.

 

But I'm getting worse in this area, too.

 

In real life, I'm known for my patience. I think I've mentioned this before, but my "hey, hey, relax" outlook is one of the main personality traits that landed me a wife. I am patient to a fault when it comes to checking out the latest restaurant, movie, technology, vehicle or social media site. My patience as a boss is very out of character with the ones who preceded me. I even waited to get the covid vaccine -- not because I'm some sort of wacked conspiracy theorist, but because I wanted to make sure the people who needed it got it first and I hate standing in lines. (So I guess I'm not very patient in the line-standing category).

Even in the hobby I have the traits of a patient person. I like set-collecting the best, which at its speediest is pretty much a year-long process, if you're lucky. I habitually ignore new product so that I can get the cards I want for cheaper years later.

But my patience is wearing thin. I find myself getting more aggravated over life's little inconveniences, stuff like dumb drivers and packages that won't open. Is this a result of getting older?

And, in the hobby, I'm losing my patience, too.

In what I think is mostly a product of the card times in which we live -- nothing on the shelves and all that -- I'm not waiting at all to get the new cards that I want. For example, when 2021 Heritage came out, I immediately signed up for a box break of the stuff, just so I could get as many of the Dodgers cards as soon as possible.

These all came from Nachos Grande's Breakers Club 2 group break. A lot of guys up there have issues lately.

 

 

Subset stuff -- and Heritage is heavy on subsets this year, just like 1972 Topps was.

 

But that wasn't all of the Heritage Dodgers and somehow, even though I've done so before many times, I just couldn't wait to get rest of them.

 

So I immediately grabbed the Heritage Dodgers that I was missing from Sportlots.

 

Blake Treinen is almost the only player in the Dodgers bullpen who knows how to relieve, and there's no guarantee that's going to last either.

 

The cards of A.J. Pollock and Enrique Hernandez are 2 of only 3 Dodgers in the short-print portion of the set, which is much smaller than in most of the recent Heritage sets as I'm usually chasing down four or five players that are SPs.

 

This is part of the reason that I'm just one card away from finishing the 2021 Heritage team set just two months after it was released. It's taken me more than a year to complete the Heritage team set in other years.

 

The other reason is being able to order the cards online -- well, being forced to order the cards online -- has made me much less patient. The old way of opening packs bought at the store and hoping I'd pull a Dodger is very nostalgic for me, but it's not very efficient and you get a lot of weird looks from all of those impatient people out there who have been ordering exactly what they want -- in a timely manner -- for years.

I'm not sure I like being one of those impatient people, but I think I have now become one.

When I was ordering the rest of the Heritage Dodgers from Sportlots, I skipped over the World Champions card that is No. 1 in the set, only because it was being sold for a stupid price. But when my Sportlots cards arrived and I remembered that I still needed that card, I immediately went to the site again to search for the card. I found a properly priced one this time and it's been ordered up. Not very patient but very efficient, damn it!

Here are the other Dodgers from the team set and the ones that I was looking forward to the most after the Dodgers won the World Series.

But there are a couple issues with Heritage's treatment of the Series. One, there is no "series celebration" card as there was in the '72 Topps set. That's probably because card No. 1 in Heritage is a celebration shot (because we can't have traditional team photo shots anymore).

The other issue is that Heritage weirdly skipped over Game 3 of the World Series, which was a Dodgers win (Game 2 and 4, Rays victories, are included in the set). I looked to the '72 set to see if it skipped Game 3.

Nope. It's there. And so are all the other games from the 1971 World Series.

So, that's odd.

The Dodgers heroes for Game 3 last year, Walker Buehler and Austin Barnes, are not featured in Heritage. I would have been flipping out over Buehler's absence in Heritage -- probably in a ranting post all of its own -- except that it's been mentioned that Topps has left out several notable players from Heritage this year, apparently so it can include some substance in Heritage High Numbers later this year.

So Buehler and Barnes will probably each appear in High Numbers. Perhaps Game 3 will, too? Although that would be awfully weird.

Even weirder than this:

This is one of the stranger cards of the year. There has never been an eight-player leaders cards before. Ozuna and Tatis Jr had 18 and 17 home runs, respectively, in last year's shortened season. The rest of the guys all had 16. This is a card in the team collection for Dodgers, Braves, Padres, Mets and Diamondbacks fans.

Oh, and here's this rant again:

How much more readable were cards in 1972? The only way you can read the back of the 2021 Heritage card is because it's been magnified and back-lit. Trust me, this is very difficult to read in person, EVEN AT 3:15 IN THE AFTERNOON ON A SUNNY DAY AS I NOW WRITE THIS!!!

 

So ... back to patience. Or impatience.

 

While I was impatiently waiting for my Sportlots box to arrive (another story of impatience that I've detailed before but the brief summation on the latest go-around here -- I paid and ordered on April 5, it arrived on May 6, although it was a delayed a few days because I wasn't aware it was ready for me to request shipment), some more cards arrived.

 

These were from Kerry of Cards On Cards:

 

Oops.

 

Heh ... silly impatient me.

 

If I was my old blogging-and-trading-and-pack-buying self, I would've casually collected my Heritage team needs throughout the summer, gathering the cards like harvesting various berries in June, July and August.

 

But, no, new me NEEDS TO CONSUME, CONSUME, CONSUME!!!!!

 

Oh, well. The beauty of Heritage team dupes is they can go to my supposed Heritage set collection. Heritage and Allen & Ginter are about the only modern sets that, even if I'm not collecting the full set, I still pretend I'm collecting it, because the cards are much more substantive than other current cards.

 

 

Kerry did send some stuff that I didn't have already like the shiny Buehler Optic card from last year. He also finished off my team sticker set from 2019! Fronts and backs!!! Woo-hoo!

 

Ever since I noticed that my patience is wearing thin I've started to make an effort to ease up. Outbursts aren't worth it most of the time and you're not going to win any admirers doing it.

 

I'd like to be more patient in the hobby again. But packs are going to need to return to stores for that to happen.

 

Also, I've already signed up for a Group Break of 2021 Big League.

 

So I'd like to say it's going to be a process. But as far as the hobby goes, I think it's more that the patience ship has sailed.