Night Owl Cards

  I keep forgetting that the latest Hall of Fame induction ceremony is coming up this weekend. Usually I prepare these Hall of Fame posts in advance but I suddenly realized that I've got to get it done by the weekend.   My reason for forgetting is that this class is quite forgettable. It's three players from the '90s/'00s/'10s. All three are not exactly popular among baseball fans as a whole. Two were Dodgers and neither came out of it well. The other guy spent virtually his whole career on irksome teams aggravating and tormenting the Dodgers (sometimes in trashy ways). So, no, I won't be watching the ceremony.   But I will update my most Hall of Famers series, which I am doing yearly now that I've covered every Topps flagship set, documenting how many Hall of Famers are in each one.   Like last year, I am only listing the years for which the totals have changed after adding Carlos Beltran, Andruw Jones and Jeff Kent.   This time around 25 sets have increase...

    Back in January, when we knew the five former players who were going to be inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame for 2025, I wrote a post on those five players, mentioning how many cards I had of each of them.   I went back to that post to see if I had gained any cards of Dick Allen, Dave Parker, CC Sabathia, Ichiro Suzuki or Bobby  Billy Wagner since.   I did. None for Sabathia or Wagner, but one each for Allen and Suzuki and five for Dave Parker. That makes sense, since Parker is from my era and I always want his cards. But I was surprised I had gathered a whole five and I didn't know which ones those were (the one above is one of them though). The key thing to know is it gave me more than 100 Parker cards as in January the total stood at 99.   Dave Parker's induction was the one I was looking forward to most. Unfortunately, he passed away last month and now the induction ceremony is a lot less interesting to me as both Parker and Allen are gone. ...

    Ever since I dropped cable, I haven't viewed much of the Hall of Fame's annual induction ceremony, which used to be a regular must-watch.   I saw a little bit of it on YouTube the other day and watched as the players already in the Hall were introduced at the beginning. That's always a fun part. But for whatever reason I particularly noticed the HOFers who weren't there this time. Maybe it's because in previous viewings I was distracted, I just couldn't get over all of the Hall of Famers in one place. But this time I was noticing that several notables were missing, not just guys who are probably at that age that they just can't go wherever they want, such as Sandy Koufax and Carl Yastrzemski, but Reggie Jackson, Robin Yount, Carlton Fisk, Nolan Ryan, Wade Boggs, Rickey Henderson, Pedro Martinez, Greg Maddux and others weren't there.   Maybe that's always the case and just something I focused on this year.   Every Hall of Fame card is treasured, t...