That'll do

 

Unlike any other Dodgers team of the last decade, I have not held the current version to a very high standard.

Their offseason moves were underwhelming, they let a lot of familiar names go, and it looked much like a reset season. Their first 25 games were about what I expected and to any fellow fan who appeared distraught, I just pointed to the lineup the team was trotting out daily. You can't expect them to win with that.

The outlook has gotten a lot better the last couple of weeks. The Phillies series could well be the highlight of the season and that game on Wednesday maybe the game of the year. We'll see. The Padres are next and nothing is guaranteed this weekend other than something San Diego, a player or a fan being annoying.

But for now, I feel good about my favorite team, which is the perfect time to show off the rest of my COMC order. You saw the first part of it last week, all of the Allen & Ginter mini action. Just about the remainder of it was Dodgers.

At the time I placed the order -- this was my first big online order of the year -- I had done very little with adding Dodgers to my collection in 2023. So there was a lot of catching up. One of the first things on my "to do" list was finally getting the rest of the 2021 Chrome Platinum cards that I needed.

 

I almost did it, too. But there are so many Dodgers in this set that I started to lose track of what I had and what I didn't. In the end I landed all but three of them.

The ones that are left:

Keibert Ruiz. COMC copies were too expensive.

Trevor Bauer. I have a difficult time spending money on his cards.

Will Smith. There just wasn't one available at the time.

All three are now in one online cart or another though. I still love these damn cards. Just can't help it.

This order was also about finally getting the 2020 cards that weren't available that year, due to supply issues and annoying hobby newbies/returnees snapping up everything in sight. One of those items absolutely not around at that time was 2020 Chrome. So I grabbed what I could. Almost got them all, except for a couple -- predictably those cards are of rookies.

More 2020. I've never been so behind on a team collection since my return to the hobby than I have been for 2020. I don't know if I'll ever catch up completely. Of course I could be buying sapphire parallels until the end of time.

The last 2020 cards I needed to complete two team base sets. Both rookies.

I did gravitate toward shiny with this order. But I tried to be smart about it. For example, my venture into Stadium Club Chrome, a set that is repetitive by nature, meant I find a couple of cards only of players without repeat images from the main Stadium Club set.

Some "Farewell Cody" cards. All of them pretty sharp.

Online orders are about the only way I can land Kershaw cards these days. They don't show up in trade packages very often anymore. And you can't snag them in discount boxes at shows. But these were nicely cheap.

 

And I finally got the base insert version of Topps' yearly retro series for 2019, 2020 and 2021. Had plenty of parallel versions already, of course.

Some late '90s Dodgers. The top three came after watching Nachos Grande box breaks. He breaks a lot of late '90s stuff. I used to participate in his breaks but don't since everything went to Discord (Discord, in general, gives off "exclusive club" vibes but some of that might be because I can't log into it on my laptop). But I still watch the videos when I can. I had no idea about those Pacific team cards (the Mondesi's). When I looked them up on COMC, I was surprised that they were like 2 bucks apiece.

The Pacific Omega Nomo jumped out at me. And at one point, my cart contained lots of '90s Starting Lineup cards. I had to weed some stuff out, only the comical Kevin Brown remained.

A couple of notable 2003 MVPs for the heck of it.

I have always wanted to do this. The 2008 Baseball Heroes parallels really liven up a dull set. I grabbed as many Andre Ethiers as a I could years ago and never went back until now. This will spice up the binder. Notice none of them are Andruw Jones.

The rest of the Dodgers don't fall neatly into any category. The Fernando Valenzuela Nestle card is just my second '84 Nestle Dodger. Trea Turner finally completes last year's Heritage High Numbers team set.

Finally for those of you who aren't interested in Dodgers or modern cards, this is all I got in the other categories:

The '72s are much-needed upgrades for my complete set. The Hostess is the most random of random Hostess cards from my needs list.

And that's it. I expect my next COMC order to be a lot less Dodger-centric. Although if they're going to advance far into the playoffs, like I didn't expect yet am totally used to, all bets are off. You could be seeing Dodger cards until this blog turns bluer than it already is.