Night Owl Cards

  Clayton Kershaw should reach 3.000 strikeouts tonight in the Dodgers' game against the White Sox. That's provided that he lasts more than two or three innings, but he's been doing pretty well since his return off the injured list, so chances are good.   Kershaw will become the first Dodgers pitcher -- who is known as a Dodger pitcher -- to achieve the milestone while a Dodger. There have been other pitchers who either started with the Dodgers and reached the milestone with another team or pitched briefly with the Dodgers and reached the milestone but are not commonly associated with the team.   Don Sutton, Pedro Martinez and Greg Maddux all pitched for the Dodgers but struck out their 3,000th batter with someone else.    In one case, a pitcher hit the 3,000 milestone while with the Dodgers, but is more well-known as a National or a Tiger or a Diamondback or even a Met.     In fact, Max Scherzer is the most recent pitcher to reach 3,000 strikeouts. It...

  Yesterday I attended the big show at the state fairgrounds that goes off twice a year. The last time I was there was in September and I obtained the majority of cards from three dealers who are almost always there and almost always get the majority of my business.   I was so confident that they would be there this time that I didn't bother to update my blog want lists or to finally figure out how to access my TCDB want lists on my phone. I just took my hand-penned want list for 1969 Topps and 1979 Topps football and stuffed them in my pocket. If two of those dealers were there, then that would be sufficient.   Well, neither of the two were there. This was a crisis because they are there so often I automatically thought something was wrong. Then I realized just about all my vintage options were gone. The crumpled list in my pocket was useless.   It was time to regroup, though after I did, I walked the show with a lot more uneasiness than I usually do. Not only were...

  Is this a new series? I think it might be. I was attempting to hunt down a new angle for the "Joy of a Team Set" series a week or two ago, but I'm starting to feel like I've run out of ideas for that series. I'm not going to end it, I may have just hit a temporary snag, but I thought I'd go in a slightly different direction. I've praised the common, ordinary subset many times on this blog and have devoted a full post to individual ones here and there. I've even written a magazine article focused on them. Subsets seem like a fad of the past, with inserts taking over in the mid-to-late '90s. But the subset still appears periodically. However, I don't count a group of cards as subsets if they are not numbered consecutively in a set. That's the first rule of defining a subset. (Topps, start grouping your league leader cards together again, please). Subsets have been part of main sets since the 1950s, probably longer. During the '50s and ...

   My approach on 2021 Topps, after seeing the cards, empty shelves and the tales of inflated prices, was that I could last the entire year without buying any.   The effort wasn't worth it. I'll just take my Dodgers and go home.   I went to Target once after the release date a couple weeks ago, I don't really remember what day I went, and saw empty shelves and shrugged.   So, move forward two weeks and it's birthday season. Those who have read this blog for awhile know I have a lot of birthdays in my family in March and it's the primary shopping time of the year, besides Christmas. I went to Target yesterday for a few items and I made sure to check the card aisle, just in case. I didn't expect to find anything, but I think you know me by now, I have to buy my first packs of the season if I have the opportunity. It's worth a look. The shelves seemed fairly empty as I approached. But they weren't. When I got there, I saw maybe six or seven 2021 Topps baseb...