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A lot dumber than I thought

  First off, thanks to those who showed me the way on TCDB for the 1977-79 Sportscaster cards. I received responses via the comments, email and on social media. I agree, it's quite the morass -- way too many variations -- but it's a little more decipherable (at least more readable) than those Donruss back variations.   I tend to excuse variations and such when they are cards connected to my childhood. I increasingly lose patience as the years get closer to the present time.   For example, I just had my first close-up experience with 2022 Topps Chrome Sonic. This set is a bigger quagmire than I thought.   Not that I paid much attention. I've been pretty dismissive of sets from the last four years. Thanks to unavailability and lack of appeal for sets since 2020 or so, I focus solely on a few main sets and the others hover around in the ether. So it took a TCDB trade offer from reader kcjays for me to take note. 2002 Chrome Sonic is really dumb -- I mean, I kind of vaguely kne
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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 C
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Every Clemente tells a story

  I'm already pleased with the brand-new collecting atmosphere on Bluesky as compared with Twitter. One excellent sign is I can find blog topics from the upstart site, which was a big Twitter benefit before it went south. The other day, the discussion turned to Roberto Clemente cards, and I realized that just about every vintage Clemente card that I have acquired comes with a story. I suppose that's a given with how treasured and expensive his cards can be, but it's just weird how the stories jump out with him. I don't know if I can say that about any other vintage player.   To demonstrate, I will go through each of my vintage Clemente acquisitions and the story that is attached to each. I don't have a lot of vintage Clementes, so this won't be long. Also, longtime readers have likely read these all before because I've recounted each of them on my blog when they happened. But this blog is about 70 percent regurgitation at this point anyway.   July 2024 1969
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The Awesome Night Card Binder, pages 13-24

  Now that the 1975 Topps worst-to-best countdown is finished, I'm a bit lost without having anything to count down. I'm sure I'll come up with something else eventually but right now I have at least one counting up series in the works. It's somewhat of a poor substitute, but it is helping my collection -- in theory. I started The Awesome Night Card Binder review in April , showing off the first 12 pages of my night card binder. The hope was that it would get me to find and add more cards to a stagnating project. I have to say I haven't done much in the last 6-7 months. I did add a couple more 2024 Topps cards, but I kept running into road blocks for other '24 cards -- too much goodness in the binder. I'll have to dig deeper into Series 2 and see if I can fill some holes in the higher numbers, because that's where all the holes are. All right, I've got pages 13-24 for you now. Again, I don't know how interesting this is for readers, but we know t
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You don't have to look at my want lists, please look at my want lists

  I admittedly have a tough time updating my want lists these days. Early on, my want list was just for myself. Written in a notebook or later on a spreadsheet, I was the only one who saw them. It didn't matter if they were updated, though I certainly got a thrill over crossing out a previous need in ballpoint pen. But if I skipped the process occasionally, it didn't matter. Then I started a blog and people noticed and they started sending me cards and I added a want list to my own blog that was Very Important. People from far away consulted it and tried to keep it as up to date as possible. If I didn't, folks would send me dupes -- not their fault -- but I already had plenty of those. Then TCDB came along, which was a much more efficient way to create and maintain want lists. I created one over there and now it is more accurate than the want lists on my blog. But I've kept the want lists on my blog because I think people still check them sometimes and also it's a l
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It was fun ... until it wasn't

  I deactivated my Twitter account today. Just like that, 12 years, more than 4,000 followers, and who knows how many tweets, gone. Of course it's technically not called "Twitter" anymore and that's pretty much the reason I've left. It actually took almost a year-and-a-half to cut the cord. But when the new owner took over in July of last year and the changes to the site immediately took a turn for the worse, I knew I'd eventually leave. I've been on the relatively new social media app Bluesky for the last 10 months. In the past week, it's seen an influx of collectors from the old site and, for now, Bluesky really seems like Twitter back in 2013, although without much of the crankiness that seemed to come with Twitter even in the good old days.   I know a lot of my regular readers aren't on other social media sites like Twitter or Instagram, etc. So maybe not many here can relate. I admire you folks, really. It sounds nice.   But my involvement in
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