this would have made more sense during the olympics

i've acquired some gold, silver, and bronze of my own without dedicating years of my life to an intense training regimen. all it takes is several saved ebay searches. over the last several months, i've come across a couple of sellers who offered up several parallels from the 2004 upper deck legends timeless teams set, and i pounced on quite a few.

i added a couple of gold parallels to my master set build, including tim mccarver's 1964 subset card

and mookie wilson's 1986 subset card

these are numbered to 5, and i don't really have any plans around this particular parallel. for the bronze parallels, which are numbered to 50, my main goal was to have at least one from every team subset. my recent purchases got me quite close to that goal.

bob gibson 

is card #1 in the set, and it's always nice to start at the beginning. 

this jim kaat card

was the first bronze parallel i've found for a 1965 twin.

jim lonborg

was my first non-dodger pc, so adding his card made a lot of sense to me, and it is the only 1967 red sox bronze i have as well.

lou brock

is now one of four 1967 cardinal bronze parallels in the collection

and i didn't "need" denny mclain

as i already had a couple 1968 tigers in bronze form, but because it's a memorable moments card i pulled the trigger

this steve carlton

is my lone 1968 cardinals bronze

but boog powell

is one of the six i have for the 1969 orioles

here are two bert campaneris bronze parallels

and one vida blue

the blue is the lone 1975 a's bronze card in my collection

i added cecil cooper's card

just because he's cecil cooper

same can be said for george foster

but this one was a happy find as it represents the 1979 reds in the collection

manny trillo

is the only 1980 phillies bronze card i have, and i found it on sportlots!

i had no bronze parallels of the 1983 orioles, but came away from my most recent transaction with two - cal ripken jr

and john shelby

as a dodger fan, i couldn't leave shelby behind.

dwight gooden

lou whitaker

and dave winfield 

were the remainder of my non-dodger bronze additions, but they were opportunity acquisitions and not needed for the one from each team effort.

al downing's 1974 bronze parallel

is a duplicate so i now have a card to represent that team in the "set" build. i added some other dodger bronze cards, but they feed the dodger collection first.

ron cey

steve garvey

tommy john

steve yeager

bill russell

jerry reuss

ron cey

i added a second kirk gibson

to the collection to represent the 1988 dodgers in the set.

i am missing only bronze parallels from the 1987 and 1991 twins teams, so you can be sure i will be keeping an eye out for any of those that might pop up.

i did also add a few more dodger gold parallels while i was at it - al downing

ron cey

davey lopes

pedro guerrero

and ron cey

again. as i said up top, i don't have any illusions about picking up all or even most of these but i will bite from time to time.

as for the silver part of the post, the "base" autographs are sometimes referred to in that way, and i've added three since my last update. first, the late merv rettenmund

and the late luis tiant

and finally another steve garvey

that garvey goes into the dodger collection as i already had one in the pc.

there are still a bunch of parallels out there for sale, but for now i am content. until i see some bronze twinkies.

rolled reuss?

back when i was playing baseball (mostly in the 1980's), uniform day was a much anticipated milestone. one thing that got a lot of attention were the stirrups.

there were lots of things to consider - do you stretch them or not? if so, how much of the top of the stirrup will you show? and, the more you stretch, the more material closer to the knee, and with that there was the question of whether you fold or roll that material. and remember -  we wore socks, covered by "sanitarys", and then the stirrups. three layers of material that contributed to the mass that needed to be dealt with. some of my teammates used tape to try to keep it all in place, but a lot of them rolled it down.

it looks like jerry reuss was a "roller" based on the image used on his 1982 topps sticker

but i reached out to him to get the scoop:

My older brother tutored me on the proper sock roll. I don’t know where he came up with the method but it sounded right to me. Put on uni pants with bottoms near your ankles. Then pull sanis as high as you can get them, followed by the stirrups (preferably 7”) riding same height. Pull up pants and fold all three layers together to desired height. If the socks were striped, I made sure all stripes were visible.

that's great big league advice right there! you can see examples of the stripes he refers to on his 1972 topps card (cardinals) and 1976 topps card (pirates).

i can't tell what pedro guerrero's tendencies were from the photo on reuss' sticker, but he clearly stretched his stirrups! his 1985 topps sticker 

doesn't show any bulk near his knee, so maybe he didn't have to roll or fold?!

one guy who i am pretty sure didn't stretch his stirrups was steve garvey, as you can see a pretty standard approach on his cards including this 2004 donruss world series blue card

it's hard to tell, however, if garvey rolled or folded. i assume folded, but his left leg shows some bulk. still, it looks folded to me. as an aside, i folded, and my league issued stirrups looked like garvey's in my little league days. if you go back to the first post on this blog, you will see that i stretched them out a bit as i moved on to babe ruth baseball.

in earlier decades, i think the stirrups were slightly different, with less actual stirrup. case in point, jim gilliam's 2002 topps superteams foil parallel card

shows very little of the sock underneath the stirrup.

in recent years, after a preponderance of long pants that showed no sock, sanitary, or stirrup for many players, this has been replaced by socks with designs, like cody bellinger is wearing on his 2022 topps pristine refractor parallel

even more recently, these socks have evolved to include a stirrups design! you can see this on jj bleday's 2023 topps stadium club card

looks like he pulled those socks up a bit higher than intended!

thanks to number 41 for his insight on the topic, and no matter whether they are stretched and folded or rolled or just printed on socks, i enjoy seeing the stirrups!

completely stuck

for almost 15 years i have had published want lists, and before that i had my binder cards checklist in excel format. at no time did either of those lists include this item as a want or need:

that is a 1982 topps sticker, whose subject is the 1981 national league championship series. it says so on the back:

it is not traditionally included in the dodger team set lists that i was aware of - it is most often categorized as a gary carter item instead. however, when i was entering my dodger haves in to tcdb, i saw that this sticker was tagged as a dodger card, too.  what i thought was a complete team set in my collection was no longer such, and so i decided to buy the sticker to add it to my dodger collection.

and why not? there are more dodgers in the image than expos - that's bill russell sliding in to home plate and i can make out ron cey as one of the dodgers in the olympic stadium dugout in the background. since the dodgers won the series, it was easy for me to add the sticker to my dodger collection - in my binder, spreadsheet, and on tcdb. i will mention, however, that i only have one of the 1975 topps world series cards in my dodger collection since they won only one game that series. i recognize my inconsistency but it's my collection.

in 1985, the dodgers horrifically lost the nlcs to the cardinals after being up 2 games to none, and i was happy that there was no card in the 1986 topps set that would make me relive the cardinal fans being urged to "go crazy". i didn't really pay attention to the stickers that were released that year, either, and so just recently added a dodger sticker that commemmorates the playoff series

it's a pretty benign representation of the series, with bill madlock getting the honors. it makes sense, as he hit 3 home runs in the six games played, although the dodgers lost each of the 3 in which he homered.

that was the only sticker i was going to add to my collection from the nlcs, but then i found this one in a monster box at a card shop last month

i am 99% sure that this is not ozzie smith's walk-off home run from game 5, and with mike scioscia there behind the plate, i figure it is not too dissimilar from the sticker at the top of this post.  there is a third sticker from the set that celebrates the series, but it shows the aftermath of jack clark's home run (first base was open) and only features cardinals, so i passed on it.

i did grab some other dodger stickers from the set

most of the dodgers are matched up with orioles, with the exception being jerry reuss. mike marshall gets paired up with future friend rick dempsey.

it's been a long time since i've added a greg brock item to the collection, but here he is with one of my almost favorite non-dodgers fred lynn

mike scioscia is there with old friend lee lacy, and we get another madlock sticker to round things out. i believe i am only missing the ken howell and orel hershiser stickers now from my team set.  for what it's worth, the guy at the lcs gave me these 1986 stickers for free. huzzah.

back to 1982, i also decided to add a couple of the stickers from that year to my steve garvey collection.  the dodger team received a two-sticker layout celebrating their 1981 world series championship, and the garv is featured on this half

he's there in the second row next to longtime trainer bill buhler.  of course i also added the o-pee-chee version:

it was very strange to me back in '82 when there were no postseason cards in the flagship set. i though 1979 was just an anomaly when topps brought the subset back in 1980 and 1981. i guess maybe they wanted to create a draw to the sticker set by making those items exclusive starting in 1982? if that were the case, it didn't work on me as it took me 40 years to add a couple of these to my collection.

in closing, let's move on to more modern stickers

that is a 2013 topps mlb album sticker (i will just call it a 2013 topps sticker) of andre ethier. it was the last of the 2013 dodgers i needed to complete the team set. a great way to bookend this post. huzzah!