Night Owl Cards

  I continue to add my card inventory to the Trading Card Database site. Nothing quite underlines the fact you have too many cards like this process. I'm probably a little more than halfway through, 60 percent perhaps, and there's still so much more to cover. It leaves a lot of time for thinking as you're checking box after TCDB box. And one of the things that I was thinking about yesterday is how not every team collector's experience is the same. This is not a sudden realization, for anyone. I've long known that a person who collects Dodgers or Yankees or Red Sox is not going to have the same collecting experience as someone who collects Brewers or Diamondbacks. This is not 1979 when Topps was the only game in town and there was basically one set to chase and the teams received pretty much the same allotment of cards. Since the '90s, and probably with boxed sets before that, team distribution has been all out of whack. Some teams get a lot of cards, some get ve...

With the arrival of an envelope from GCA of The Collective Mind , I finally completed the 2018 Topps flagship Dodgers team set. Kyle Farmer was a tricky little devil. I don't know what it was. Maybe that semi-rare "C/3B" designation. But it doesn't matter because all 31 cards in this year's team set are present. At 31 cards this is one of the largest Dodgers team sets for Topps of all-time. Based on the research I did a little while ago , it ranks in the top 10, tied with 1964, 1972, 1986 and 1987 for sixth place. Although this seems admirable, there is quite a bit of bloat in the 2018 team set, which accounts for the large number. Because Topps went to league leader cards that feature just one player, they are now part of the team set. Take out all those "extras" -- including the random checklist card -- and the Dodgers' team set falls to 25 cards. Here is a look at the set: If I were to apply my Joy of a Team Set breakdown to...

Team collectors: do you find that trying to complete your team sets is getting more difficult? I was feeling pretty good about where I was already with the Dodgers I had accumulated from this year's Allen & Ginter product. With 10 cards down and five inserts landed, I figured I was getting pretty close to finishing it off. Wrong. This year's A&G set happens to include more Dodgers base cards than in any other previous A&G set. There are 17 of them, so I'm barely halfway there. You may chalk this up to the Dodgers showing up in the World Series. But the Dodgers are one of the most popular teams in sports so there's always going to be plentiful cards in each Topps set. I just didn't expect to be so far behind when I thought I was way ahead. I decided to look back on past A&G sets to see how many Dodgers showed up in the base set each year. It turned out it wasn't exactly a straight line going up. 2006: 9 2007: 10 2008: 16 2009: 12...

On the previous card show post , I accidentally inserted one of those page breaks into the story. If you didn't click on the "read more" link, you may have missed all the vintage that I showed from the card show. It's fixed now, so check that out if you're interested. Now onto tonight's post. We are a long way from how I collected cards of my team when I was young. As a kid, I'd wait to pull the team card with the checklist on the back, note the 24 or 25 individuals listed for the Dodgers, curse out the one Dodger included on a four-player rookie card, and then get to work. When I was finished -- if I even did finish -- there were 24 or 25 dudes in Dodger uniforms, plus the team photo card, in my complete team collection. But that was a long time ago. With the advent of inserts, team collecting includes a lot more than it once did. No longer restricted to Dodger players or a manager, now sitting in my team binders are cards of stadiums, play...

Heck of a card. Heck of an image. Wouldn't you love to be Koufax back in the day? I'd settle for being one of those kids back in the day. This Bazooka insert from Archives or Heritage -- I'll figure it out later -- arrived in a single-card envelope from Rod of Padrographs . It happens to be the 175th different Sandy Koufax card in my collection. That's not as impressive as it sounds considering 151 of those cards were issued after his playing career and 119 created in the last six years. But for whatever reason Sandy prompted me to recalculate how many Dodgers cards I have in my collection. I last counted up almost five years ago and totaled just over 15,000. Two-and-half years before that I calculated 10,615 Dodgers cards in my collection. This time I came up with 19,927. With the start of the 2018 card season less than a month away, I will be going over 20,000 unique Dodgers cards (with God knows how many dupes) within the next two or three months. My p...

I have yet to complete the Dodgers team set for 2017 Topps flagship. While others bought a couple of boxes when Series 2 first came out and finished off their team sets that very day, I'm still missing the Kenta Maeda card. I'm not stressing about it. Even if I don't buy any more Series 2 -- and I don't plan to -- I know it'll arrive at my abode relatively soon. Besides, there is one pleasant side effect to me struggling to complete the team set: It means the team set -- at least for the Dodgers -- is more complete this year. In fact, it's been more complete the last two years. Each of the last two years, there have been 28 base Dodgers over Series 1 and Series 2. That is more base cards for the Dodgers in a flagship set in almost 25 years. Not since 1993 when there were 29 Dodgers. I am one of those team collectors that likes to see as many players from my favorite team represented in the flagship set as possible. It reminds me of trying to collect...

The 2017 card season has been pretty uninspired. I'm not someone who needs a lot of bells and whistles, all I ask for is a nice design and a little creativity and thought. I haven't seen much of that so far this year. With Topps Series 2 out now, I haven't bothered to check whether it's at any local big box store. I have no interest in adding more of the 2017 flagship design to my collection. So, I was thrilled to find out that Peter of Baseball Every Night was holding a team break of Series 2. What a great way to get the Dodgers that I need without having to spend my cash on Marlins and Brewers and A's on that half-finished design they're throwing at us this year! I was able to land 18 Dodgers from Series 2 in this break. I nabbed every base card except for two of them, the Kenta Maeda card, and, of course, the only Dodger card from this series that anyone is talking about, the team card that shows a collective salute to Vin Scully. But with everyth...

Those of you who have been hard-core team collectors for a decade or so, on average how many cards do you figure you need when you land a random lot of your team's cards? I've never really kept track. But it's something I'd like to figure out. So I'm using a bunch of Dodgers that I received from Johnny's Trading Spot as kind of the guinea pig test case. John and I are trying to work out a deal for that John Smoltz autograph card I pulled, but in the meantime he landed about 300 random Dodgers on me. Out of those 300 cards, I counted 40 that I needed. That comes to 13 percent. You may have winced at that number. But I can tell you're not a veteran team collector. I am actually thrilled that I need that many. You may think that there are very few Dodger cards that I need. I don't see it that way at all. I see Dodger cards that I need every day. And they're not super fancy or old Dodger cards. They're random base cards from like 2 years ag...