Golden again

 

Here's a fairly timely post.

Yes, I've been watching the Olympics. It's partly my job and I'm so happy everything is happening six hours ahead of time. Makes things easier amid all the other obstacles I encounter these days when putting together an informative sports section.

As I've said before, my favorite summer Olympic sports to watch are indoor volleyball (that beach thing has to go), track and field and archery. Track and field is the only one of those three NBC shows a lot, but I don't have the energy to deal with password hell to get on Peacock and see other sports. Maybe if baseball was actually in the Olympics I'd make the effort.

But I like seeing the U.S. rack up gold medals no matter what the sport. And to stay with the theme, I've racked up another gold parallel team set.

I wrote a post six months ago about trying to chase down gold parallels for Dodgers team sets for some of the recent Topps sets where I like what it did with the parallels (that means ignoring gold parallels from sets like 2017 and 2018).

I finished the 2008 Dodgers team set and started tracking down 2009 gold parallels next.

I had many of the '09 Dodgers goldies already, including the key second-year Kershaw parallel. So I picked up most of the last few pretty easily. Then, with one left, I hit a wall.

That last card was the Greg Maddux. There are so many Greg Maddux player collectors.

I couldn't find any Maddux golds available. I looked and looked, then returned and looked again. It was then that I figured, well, I'm going to be at this one particular gold set for awhile. I set up a search for the card and expected not to see anything for months.

But it didn't take long at all. I got an alert a week or two later and the Maddux was mine and now the 2009 gold parallel team set is finished, too. Here it is:

 

That team set is two cards larger than the 2008 Dodgers set but at 24 cards still pretty small. The 2024 Dodgers team set is 34 cards (post on that down the line)!

 

Whatever gold parallel team set I choose next will take a little more work. I'd like to work on 2006 or 2007 but still need to chase a fair amount. So it may be a bit before I'm announcing another completion.

 

Then again, I could completely forget about this project until I stumble across some reminder a year and a half from now. You know how that goes.