Before things heat up

 

I expect my card purchasing to heat up in the weeks to come. I'm starting to see the budget loosening just a little. Also, the new cards of the season are expected to debut starting next week and then more new sets will show up over the next month or so.

I made my first Sportlots purchase of the year just the other day, so that will be the first significant addition to my collection for 2023 (but even there I had to remove some cards from my cart to get it under the budget line).

But even though I haven't had a lot of new stuff to show since the first of the year that doesn't mean I'm not collecting furiously under the surface. There is a lot going on behind the scenes that you don't see here.

 

These are a couple of cards I added to the 2022 insert/parallel portion of my collection through KellysKards1768 on Twitter. He's always raising money for some worthy cause. I could only afford to send $2.25 this time around, but that grabbed me two Dodgers and a couple cards for somebody else.

 

Reader Dana sent me another greeting card the other day with a couple of needs (I just need the Freddie Freeman to finish off 2022 Gallery). You may wonder what the heck the Phil Hiatt card is doing with these. No, it's not Royals-Dodgers Uniform Confusion, Dana was actually correcting a wrong in this post. It turns out that I had the wrong 1994 card at card #94 -- and it had been wrong since the first version of the post in 2014!

Hiatt is now in the proper place of honor on that post.

 

 

These were another Twitter acquisition for a tiny fee from Trevor (Tec872). I have been known to upgrade my 1975 Topps set when the opportunity is there and the same goes for the minis.

You probably noticed right away that the Bochte and Goodson minis are shorter than the others. That is a known trait of the green-yellow minis as there were cutting issues. Many of them have a yellow strip traveling across the top of the card, above the green. The yellow is from the card above it on the sheet. If the yellow strip is removed (I don't know if some of the cards were trimmed before being put into packs or what), then the card is even mini-er than other minis!

Here is a side-by-side:

So is the card an upgrade if it doesn't have the yellow strip at the top? I admit I didn't think of that when I grabbed those two green-yellow minis. Something to ponder while staring lovingly at my '75 mini pages.

Participating in Matt's Diamond Jesters' Time Travel giveaways doesn't cost any money except for postage, so it's ideal for this time of year!

I made amends for my earlier Time Travel mess in which I acquired three 1979 Topps football cards that I had already by landing these six fine specimens. I sure do love this set (second only to the '77 set) and I need to make finishing/coming close to finishing it a priority this year.

Because even though I'm anticipating the 2023 cards right now and spending some money on them (Heritage is using the '74 design you guys), we all know how sick we're going to be of them in a few months.

 

Or in some collectors' cases, a couple weeks. 😒