2023: the best, the worst, the ... same old, same old ahead

 

In reflecting on the past card year I've realized that this end-of-the-year tradition probably needs some adjusting.

A lot of the categories that I've used year after year don't really apply. For example, "Best Pulls," is for when I opened a lot of retail product, but I don't do that anymore. I didn't pull a single autograph this year, almost no variations or anything other than a random relic swatch a couple times.

I can barely comment on what's going on with current cards because I just don't buy more than a sampling and if I'm not trying to complete the set, then I probably don't care about what's happening with the set, how it's different and all that fan-boy nonsense. My comment on anything Bowman? It's stupid. There. There's my informed opinion.

 

But I will still press forward with this post because I love a year-end recap, if only to remind myself that -- see? I did make some collection progress this year!

 

But as far as goals and all the usual new year traps, there won't be much of that in this post, especially this year. That's because, thanks to one significant product on the 2024 horizon, it should be a whole lot of same old, same old for the next 12 months. Get ready to yawn.

 

So without further ado, let's bid 2023 adieu.

 

BEST SET I COMPLETED

 

This is the usual indicator of how successful a year I had, and the gauge is on low for 2023. I didn't get a lot done, although I was working feverishly on set completion. The few I finished:

 

 

1981 Perma-Graphics

1980 Topps Supers

2021 Topps Chrome Tennis

1986 Fleer

 

1985 Fleer (and '85 Fleer Update)

I can't say I'm super-excited about any of those, outside of the 1980 Supers. But I can rest assured that I will do better in the coming year as I'm on the brink of finishing off several quests, which brings me to ...

 

BEST SETS I'LL COMPLETE IN 2024

1970 Topps has been in this category for the past two years. I didn't realistically expect to finish it either of those two years, although I crossed my fingers that I would pull it off.

This coming year, I'll definitely get it done. Almost all of the major cards have been obtained the last two years and with around a dozen wants left, even empty-pockets owl can get that done.

 

After landing a binder-full of 1979 Topps football at a card show this year, I should be able to finish this in the next year. Football always takes a back seat, which is why I struggle to finish these sets, but one concentrated online order could knock off almost all of it. And if I wasn't so picky about the checklists being marked on the back, I could finish it sooner (but that won't happen).

 

Another set that received an enormous boost in 2023 and one I should wrap up in 2024. The 1977 Hostess set is 13 cards away from completion. Should be easy-peasy.

There are other sets that I'd like to complete in the coming year, like a less-painful Kellogg's set like 1983. Still thinking about purchasing that 1982 Donruss set and once '77 Hostess is done I can focus on '75 Hostess. There's always something to tackle.

 

BEST SET I'LL COMPLETE IN 2024 THAT KEPT ME FROM COMPLETING SETS IN 2023

That would be 2023 Heritage. This alarming card arrived from Tony of Uncle Charlie's Shoebox the other day. It's the third-to-last card I needed for the set. The other two cards are en route to me (one is taking their sweet holiday-ass time), so this will be the subject of the first Completed Set post of the year.

It also is foreshadowing for what will happen in 2024. If 2023 Heritage -- with the 1974 Topps design -- occupied almost all of my card purchasing time for the second half of 2023, guess what the set that features the 1975 Topps design will do?

 

BEST TIME-AND-MONEY SUCK SET 

As soon as I knew I was committing to completing the 2023 Heritage set, I knew it would also take all my collecting time and money. Heritage is not friendly to the budget-conscious, yet I did a pretty good job of holding onto my cash while trying to finish it.

Thank goodness for gift cards, because that got me through to the short-print portion of the chase. Then it was just a matter of biding my time, picking off a few short-prints every weekend until grabbing the final couple the last two weeks of the year.

Considering that it took me 15 years to finish my first Heritage set (2008), I think wrapping one up in a May-to-December romance was pretty damn timely.

And so ...

BEST SET OF 2023

For me, it's easily Heritage. Outside of Topps flagship, just about every other set turned me off in some sort of way. If I wasn't so enamored with the '74 design, Heritage would turn me off, too (see below), but '74 was the first set I ever saw and touches like above really captured my interest. I shunned everything to get this set done. And when I see the stacks on my card desk -- soon to be devoted to its own binder -- I still smile.

 

 

WORST SET OF 2023

 

There are a lot of directions I could go for this year, Big League for example, but I'll mention that in a minute. For me, the worst set -- of those I had access to -- is the Chrome Platinum Anniversary set. This is the second year of the set, yet it still can't get itself into the present, this one is from 2022 but issued in 2023 (the first one was "2021" but issued in 2022). 

 

I could deal with that last year because I liked the set. In 2023 I did not. All of the photos -- or most -- look like AI-generated art. Some said it looked like that the previous year, but there's an obvious difference this year, as if there was a concerted effort to replicate the painted images of 1953 Topps but failing miserably. Some of the cards are kind of creepy -- and the fonts are all wrong, too.

WORST TOPPS MOVE

This would have been a set-killer if I didn't like the 2023 Heritage '74 design so much. The refusal to address the Angels' weird obsession with their name with any kind of plan is the equivalent of turning in a blank test to the teacher because you didn't prepare or understand the instructions. This blank flags treatment would earn a big fat red zero on your test paper.

 

Heritage was far from perfect. The treatment of the postseason cards, in which backs were repeated and the captions on the front being so generic that you barely knew which game was being represented, make those cards among the dumbest made this year.

 

Also, the Dodgers had just nine cards in the set. The Cubs, meanwhile, had 22. That's like late-1970s football imbalance there. Topps decided a couple years ago to stash some stars in the later Heritage High Numbers series, but I think it's confused itself judging by the disparity in cards per team.

 

 

WORST TOPPS MOVE 2

 

I probably should call this the "Worst Topps/Fanatics move"

 

I said I didn't feel qualified to comment on current sets anymore, but this was such a blatant slap in the face to traditional set collectors (and team collectors) that it's an easy observation. Big League morphed from a friendly, low-budget traditional set into a fantasy-card tier-fest with annoying foil and, lord, this thing was uncollectable. No surprise, I still need almost all the Dodgers from the short-printed "tiers" and those cards can stay unpurchased for as long as the prices are elevated, because I will not support shit like this. I am also annoyed at people who like this set because it just encourages Fanatics to do it again.

 

 

WORST TOPPS MOVE 3

 

 What the hell, let's get them all out of the way all at once. Topps declared open season on the set-collector in 2023 with the Big League stuff and then by adding 50 short-prints onto the usual 50 short-prints in Allen & Ginter. The extra 50 are all repeat subjects of players in the previous 350 cards and some with very similar images, such as Randy Johnson. I suppose that makes it easy for some collectors to ignore those extra 50 cards but you're really causing those with severe OCD to increase their medication with slick games like this.

 

 

BEST CARDS SENT TO ME IN 2023

 

I need a palette-cleanser:

 

 

 

There was much more than this. I kind of ran out of time. NFL games on New Year's Eve, you know.

 

 

BEST FORESHADOWING WITH A PURCHASE

I grabbed this "adver-card" out of a discount box at a card show mid-year kind of half-thinking that if I never managed to get the real 1970 Topps Nolan Ryan card, I could throw this in a page pocket and someday convince myself it was the real deal.

Then a couple of months later ...

BEST CARDS I SENT TO MYSELF IN 2023

... I landed my own actual real copy.

That was the best thing I added to my collection the past year, but there was some other stuff.

I think that will do.

 

BEST DISCOVERY

I found out that there was a card show in my town (just a couple miles away) for the first time in almost two decades.

I went to that show twice and found cards each time. The show is small and full of stuff that doesn't matter to me at all, but even finding one card I want is worth a show visit. I plan on several revisits in 2024.

 

BEST CUSTOMER SERVICE

It is easily the Baseballcardstore.ca, which more than once in the last year, tracked down cards that fit my collection and then sold them to me cheaper than any other card outlet I know. Steve and Nancy have encountered health issues lately and I wish them well, because they might be the nicest card sellers I know.

 

WORST CARD DEVELOPMENT OF 2023

For the second straight year, the worst card development of the year for me is related to those wonderful Kellogg's cards of the 1970s. A year ago, my favorite oddball of all-time was being bought up from under my nose, I was almost priced out.

But this past year I barely bought a single card off my '70s Kellogg's 3D want list. The Cracking Gremlin visited my collection and since I couldn't find a way to assure that cracking wouldn't continue to occur, I lost my desire to buy them. I did move most of the '70s cards from top loaders to a box and that seems to have helped, but there's the matter of upgrading those cracked cards and I still can't get myself to do it.

 

BEST NON-CARD ARRIVAL

I received a lot of comments on this custom-designed '75 Topps box. It's on permanent display on one of my card shelves. If I ever decide to switch from binders to boxes (it will never happen unless I downsize my living quarters), I have a spot for the '75 set.

 

BEST NON-CARD ARRIVAL 2

I received a nice giant binder from my daughter and coupled that with some one-pocket pages to form a very pleasing spot for all of my Dodgers yearbooks.

Of course I also have a bunch of Dodgers-related postseason and other publications (All-Star Game, scorebooks, etc.). So I just acquired another large binder and put that together yesterday. I love both of them.

BEST CLUELESS REACTION

I pulled this Bowman insert of Elly De La Cruz from a pack sent to me by Rod of Padrographs back in May. I had no idea who he was and said as much when I showed the card on the blog. One month later, everyone who was a baseball fan knew who he was -- and it took me quite awhile to remember I had pulled a card of the guy.

 

BEST HOBBY DECISION

I finally activated trading on Trading Card Database early in the year and my collection has been blessed. I made just over 50 trades during the year and I have no complaints about any of them. The people of TCDB are good people and, yes, that's my advertisement.

 

WORST COMPLETION

Last month I declared my 1990 Swell set complete. It didn't seem like I could screw that up, it's small enough. Well, I discovered later that I was missing the Dizzy Dean card. Then after that, I discovered I was missing the Rocky Colavito card, which I'm sure had arrived in the last year -- which means I might have traded it away -- and now this completion ruse is a black mark on the whole year.

 

BEST MAGAZINE ARTICLES WRITTEN

I'm starting to enjoy the magazine aspect that helps pay for my collection more than seeing my name in glossy lights. I guess that happens when you're entering year five of this.

 

BEST UNDER-THE-RADAR DODGER CARD ARRIVALS

I could probably give a 10-minute talk on each one of these cards.

 

BEST INDICATION THAT I'M OUT-OF-TOUCH WITH THE CURRENT COLLECTING HOBBY

Well, there are probably indications in every blog post I write, but for one particular example ...

 

The 1970 Nolan Ryan that I bought was graded and the grade on it was a 3. Anyone who reads this knows that I don't care what number is on the plastic prison and also that card will be released from that prison ASAP.

Instead of celebrating the card's arrival, several people on the former Twitter commented that the card should be resubmitted for a better grade. This is like someone coming up to me and recommending I buy an NBA jersey of whoever's popular right now because it will go up in value. A guy who collected for 20 years before grading became a thing and barely sells cards is not interested in what the number says.

 

 

WORST ONLINE COLLECTING DEVELOPMENT

 

 

While Ebay and COMC came back down to earth -- at least a tiny bit -- with their overpricing, not all was well with collecting on the internet. The worst development was the sale of Twitter, which is now called "X" for reasons only known by the new owner (which I assume is "because it's a cool letter.").

 

Now X is full of X-rated bots and other spam. You can still find collectors on X and ones that I enjoyed before the sale, but it's not the same. A lot of my kind of collectors have left the site and in their place are bunch of people who only care about selling cards and box breaks and just rampant "buy my cards" spiels. There used to be a ton of card information on the site and that's lessened. That's too bad because I sure did enjoy interacting on there despite all the freaking out that the site is known for.

 

 

BEST DISCOVERY 2

 

My daughter mentioned a card shop that is a short drive from her place and when I ventured in, I found a place that I could visit every time I visited! Discount boxes everywhere and also the usual stuff card shops have. It made me want to live there -- in the city, not the card shop, although maybe that would be cool, too.

 

 

BEST WAY TO GET ME TO STOP COLLECTING YOUR SET

 

In keeping with the Fashionably Late theme of card product the last couple of years, release dates have been pushed back so much that I couldn't collect the sets if I wanted to.

 

For months it seemed like nothing was released and then all of a sudden, during the late fall season when cash becomes scarce because of the holidays, new release was stacked upon new release. I don't have money for all that!

 

Now Stadium Club is being released after the date on the box. The 2023 edition is scheduled for release Jan. 24, 2024. Isn't that like a couple weeks before 2024 flagship is released? Why would I be interested in those old cards when new ones will show up in two weeks?

 

 

BEST SETS I COMPLETED THAT I FORGOT TO MENTION EARLIER

 

 1988 Donruss

1989 Pacific

Yeah, maybe not the most memorable sets. And like I said, football is on.

BEST EXAMPLE OF ADDING TOO MUCH ON TO MY PLATE

I started the 1993 Upper Deck blog in 2023. I got through 76 posts, but I was hoping to do a lot more. I mean I like the casual aspect of this blog but I don't want to be doing it for seven years!

OK, I could go on for even longer, but it was very apparent in 2023 that nobody has patience for "even longer" anymore. So let's get to the 2023 Person of the Year.

It's an obvious one this time:

Everyone was about collecting Shohei Ohtani in 2023. And late in the year I realized that one of those people next year will be ME.

Who knows, maybe Ohtani will the the 2024 Card Person of the Year, too, but in a Dodger uniform?

Yup, I'm rooting for more same old, same old here, too.

Happy New Year everyone. May you get a bunch of cards you want next year -- but leave the cards I want alone. You know, like 2024 Heritage.

(Persons of the Year: 2023 - Shohei Ohtani; 2022 - The idea man behind Kellogg's 3-D baseball cards; 2021 - Retail card shelf stockers; 2020 - Dustin May; 2019 - Gary V.; 2018 - Kylie Minogue; 2017 - Aaron Judge; 2016 - Justin Smoak; 2015 - Sandy Koufax; 2014 - Bill Wetmore; 2013 - maybe Josh Donaldson; 2012 - Adron Chambers)