Mr. 30,000

 

I've been blessed with a few Dodgers-centric packages in the last month. They're most appreciated because I get distracted with other non-Dodger things in my collecting and sometimes I feel that the Dodger part suffers a little. But only just a little.

 

Thanks to those packages I've reached another milestone. I'm going out of order with when I received the packages here to get straight to that milestone, but you'll see the other packages in good time. I always show them off.

 

I reached 30,000 unique Dodgers cards yesterday. It was a heavy mail day Monday, which was a nice surprise. Four separate envelopes. The Dodgers started with the beautiful 2024 Finest Shohei Ohtani, which is from the "1993 Finest 'What If ...' Prototype" insert set -- we're just getting more and more complex with our insert names.

 

That was my own purchase and it was Dodger card No. 29,994 in my collection.

 

 

Next up was a surprise envelope from Matt of Cards Over Coffee, a blog that may or may not be closing up shop. He sent six very nice 2024 Dodgers of the parallel or insert variety. Four of them were new to my collection, including the Bobby Miller '89 chrome refractor. Are these still called "mojo refractors"? I can't keep up. Card 29,995.

 

A couple of very sharp color parallels, I really like these and they are number 29,996 and 29,997 in the team collection.

 

Here comes No. 29,998. It's the foil parallel of the Mookie Betts card. It's difficult to tell but you might be able to see a hair or two clinging to the card, which happens a lot with foil. I've noticed that some foil cards this year have the black top and others don't. I don't know why.

Another envelope that arrived Monday came from Kerry at Cards On Cards. He would be the collector supplying card no. 30,000 it turns out.

At first I thought the 30,000th card would be one of these awesome Sportscaster cards -- and I guess technically Mike Marshall here would be the 30,000th. But I base this count on what's in my TCDB collection and I can't find Sportscaster cards listed (that doesn't mean they're not there, just that I have zero patience).

I've mentioned before how much I love the '70s Sportscaster cards. I really wanted my mom to subscribe so these babies could start arriving at our home. It was one of the rare cases that my mom saved me from myself when it came to my collection. I wouldn't be able to get a handle on how to store these until like 40 years later -- and my mom knew that.

I appreciate madding finding a decent-sized envelope to transport these, I always have a problem with that when I'm sending stuff.

So anyway, getting back to customary-sized cards.

This 2024 Donruss card of Diego Cartaya was the first one I saw out of the envelope after the Sportscaster cards, so it's card No. 29,999.

 

And this purple foil card of Game 2 World Series hero Yoshinobu Yamamoto from 2024 Update is card No. 30,000 in the Dodger collection! Woooooooooooooooooooo!

I know, I have too many cards.

I reached 25,000 unique Dodgers cards two years ago. So if I continue at this same rate, I should get to 40,000 Dodgers in four years time. I have no idea where all those cards are going to go.

 

 

Here are the rest of the former needs that start me on the way to 40,000. The Muncy Stadium Club card is my first Dodger of any kind from that set (I am staying far away from that judging by what I've read and saw of it so far). It's weird that the sepia parallels have random green foil on them this year.

That's also my first Halloween parallel Dodger (the Andy Pages, if that doesn't seem Halloween-y to you). It almost looks more red than orange to me.

Like I said, I've got a lot more new Dodgers to show from the last week or two. Fortunately all those Dodgers have been counted. I also recently wrapped up an organization of all my Dodgers dupes, which I do every year. I'm sending some cards out to one collector who took me up on an offer on BlueSky recently. I've got plenty more. Just say the word.