Night Owl Cards

  This is the first card I received from 2025 Topps Update. It's a foil parallel of the Miguel Rojas card. I grabbed it in a giveaway on Bluesky. We have to have our World Series heroes in our collection.   I haven't bothered to go looking for Update, I'm pretty much done with that dance. If I'm not thrilled with the design then there's no reason to collect a set with a bunch of filler. I'll just take my team set, thank you. And that arrived today.   Not the most exciting 14 cards, I saw that coming when I reviewed the checklist. There's both good and bad in that.       THE GOOD   Update went wild on relievers this year. I've seen a few mentions of that from other team collectors when they received their team sets. I know the set design make it difficult to read but that's Evan Phillips, Jack Dreyer, Anthony Banda, Blake Treinen, Alex Vesia and Roki Sasaki (not a reliever except in the postseason). No Tanner Scott though, which is kind of funny. ...

  It's tradition around here at this time to select the best Dodgers card from the year's Topps flagship. I've done this post every year on the blog since 2017, although I skipped it in 2018 for an unknown reason. (Probably the prep work was too long). And it's rooted in me selecting my favorite Dodger card way back in the late 1970s and then continuing it each year. It's now time for the 2024 selection, and like last year -- and probably the last few years -- the candidates aren't too exciting, because Topps has to crop out everything exciting. I don't know the exact reasons, but I'm betting they're modern-and-stupid. So once again we have a lot of batters batting and pitchers pitching mixed in with a few yellers yelling but virtually nothing on the periphery or in the background. Here is my selection of finalists: Can you feel the excitement?! This year's design is so good that the lack of interesting photos doesn't bother me too much.  Un...

  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...