Night Owl Cards

  Before I wrote this, I was caught between wanting to celebrate my team's World Series championship and thinking maybe I'll shut up about it because people don't want to hear it.   I know I shouldn't worry about that -- who cares what those people think, my team just won two World Series in a row for the first time since I became a fan 50 years ago! But I was raised not to boast and if people are mad about the thing I want to boast about maybe it's not worth boasting about anyway.   Still, I didn't come up with the current MLB climate of haves and have-nots. I picked my team a long time ago, before free agency was a way of life. The only super-team I knew then were the Yankees. There are several super-teams now (look up MLB payrolls, the Dodgers aren't even first). The Dodgers get a lot of hate, warranted or not. But I can't let that spoil my celebration of TWO WORLD SERIES CHAMPIONSHIPS IN ROW.   I'm not accustomed to this, obviously. I've watc...

  Today is the fifth anniversary of the Dodgers' trade with the Red Sox in which the Dodgers gained Mookie Betts for a bag of beans.   It's not a coincidence that at around the same time, Betts has moved into the top 10 in terms of the number of cards in my collection. Two World Series wins with one of MLB's flagship teams and being a hell of a bowler will do that. He's now at No. 10, according to TCDB, with 373 cards, knocking Adrian Beltre to 11th.   It seems that Betts arrived in the top 10 extremely quick. Sure, it took five years, but there are plenty of other players in my collection who are favorites, who I've been collecting for a long time, and are nowhere near the top 10.   But if you are a star during this era of collecting baseball cards, you are going to make up ground fast. Companies now issue way too many cards of the top five percent of ball players. It makes it much easier to reach the top than it ever has been. Just for my own funzies, I thought I...

  Hey, did you know it's been just about seven months since 2023 Topps flagship came out? Seven months! Don't anybody tell me the clock is slow. The clock is the world record-holder in the 100-meter dash. Update will be out before we know it and I assume news of the 2024 design will be dropping like any second. But that's all for those up-to-the-minute people. I don't run that race anymore. I've got old cards to keep me happy for the rest of time. But tradition is tradition and completing the flagship team set for my Dodgers is always a must. So is determining my favorite card from that set each year. And now it's a tradition to show that thought process -- probably something that should stay confined to my brain -- for all to see on this blog. So, the 2023 team set has been complete for about a month now, and I'm just getting to this because, although I like the design of this year's set very much, the photos -- at least for the Dodgers -- are a bit mu...