Night Owl Cards

  I finished my 2023 Topps Heritage High Numbers Dodgers team set when the last three cards arrived Thursday and Friday.   They're all horizontals, in keeping with the 1974 Topps theme, although I think '23 Heritage went a little bit overboard with them.     Just one of the players is currently with the Dodgers now as Busch was traded to Tampa Bay and  Hernandez is supposed to be joining another team soon. (Update: He's apparently coming back to the Dodgers ).   The Hernandez card is a short-print but it didn't cost me much, barely over a buck.   It's also a card that "rights a wrong" if you're into the editorial sanctity of photos (which Topps definitely is not -- lots of evidence over the decades on that).  The Hernandez card probably looks familiar to some collectors, most probably Red Sox collectors, who first came across the image in the 2021 Topps flagship set. It's another great photo on a Kiké Hernandez card. This was one of the better car...

  The Dodgers announced yesterday that it will retire Gil Hodges' uniform No. 14 and that the ceremony will take place June 4 when the Dodgers play the Mets. It's been a long time since the Dodgers retired a uniform number. The organization, with one exception, does not retire a number until the person who wore it is elected to the Hall of Fame. I think this is the proper way to retire numbers, rather than the "just-because" reasons that several other baseball teams do. The last time the Dodgers retired a uniform number was on Aug. 14, 1998 when they retired Don Sutton's No. 20. Twenty-four years have gone by since, but, heck, people have been waiting for Hodges to reach the Hall of Fame for a lot longer than that. So I figured I would revive a blog series that I haven't done in years -- just to continue the whole "what you waiting for?" theme. This is where I review all the players who have worn a certain number for the Dodgers. Today we're look...

  I have not bought any 2020 World Series commemorative cards in the two months since the Dodgers have won the Series.   I'm not above doing that. I still might do so. But I'm accustomed to waiting until the following year for recognition of the previous year's World Series and I haven't lost my patience. I can wait if I want. Heck, I'm still waiting for Topps to recognize the Dodgers' title in 1981.   So you won't see any of those commemorative cards on this list of the top 10 Dodgers cards of 2020.   You also won't see many special cards, no autographs, no relics. I acquired very few of those this year. In fact, as I mentioned in a previous post, I've accumulated fewer 2020 Dodgers cards than I have for any previous year since I've been writing the blog.   That doesn't mean there wasn't Dodgers greatness on cardboard this year. There was.   Some of it was even interesting. As an example, this card: The first thing I noticed about this c...

    It's been 45 years since I first opened wax packs of baseball cards back in 1975. I've collected cards most of those years since and every year that I've opened packs, I've hoped that there were Dodgers harbored within. I couldn't wait to see what each of the Dodger cards looked like and instinctively I picked a favorite each year. A year ago, I expanded on my first post on this topic by updating my favorite Topps Dodger card for every year since I first started collecting. (I also took a shot at naming my favorite Topps Dodger card for the years before I started collecting). Well, it's time to update that post with the 2020 Topps card. I've accumulated all the base Dodger cards from 2020 flagship and what a mind-numbing haul that is! I'm already on record as saying the 2020 design is dull and it's grown progressively more boring as the months in solitude, staring at my collection, have gone on. I've never been a fa...