Night Owl Cards

  I know I have a lot of Dodgers cards. The counter is right there on the sidebar. It went over 24,000 a couple of weeks ago. I don't know what the total is when I throw in dupes, more than twice that I guess. This is why I am hesitant to enter group breaks or similar offers that involve distributing cards by teams. The cards better be the latest because it doesn't matter where your group break lands in terms of decade, chances are I'm going to have the Dodgers (What I need is a group break of 1930s cards). But when Death Stare Cards announced a team-focused group break involving a lot of almost 2,000 insert cards he had acquired, this seemed to be the perfect fail-safe plan. I may have a lot of Dodgers cards, but inserts are always pesky to acquire. It seems like two-thirds of my want list is insert cards.   I signed up quickly. For 15 bucks, it was a steal. I received my cards not too long ago. There were 113 glorious inserts in the stack.   I needed 12.   Good gr...

  I never think that I own the largest Dodger card collection, or the 10th largest, or the 100th largest, or even the 1,000th largest.   I do know though that it is extensive and diverse. This is why I rarely enter team group breaks. With my inventory, I'd likely be adding only to my surplus. And that's just throwing money away. So when I threw $100 at Nachos Grande's Breakers Club a couple of months ago, I needed to sit myself down for a talk and explain it: "Self, yes, it's a lot of money, but he's opening a bunch of late '90s stuff and you always have holes where '90s cards go. When have you ever bought Pacific? Also, he's opening 2021 product and you know you don't want to go to the card aisle and get mixed up in a knife fight on the off-chance you pull one Dodger card. Finally, it's Nachos Grande! You know he's going to pull some fancy Dodger card, because he always does!" OK, so I convinced myself to sign up ... and then I wa...

  As of Monday I had the complete set of 2021 Topps Series 1 Dodgers in my possession, inserts and parallels excluded of course.   Thanks to buying into a Nachos Grande break, I received most of the Dodgers from the set. Then the other two -- Cody Bellinger and Gavin Lux -- came to me from reader Kyle.   I've babbled enough about the design issues in previous posts, and I'm as sick of looking at them (and trying to read them) as you are. But I'll go through the cards very quickly just to have them all in one place.   First the World Series cards, which has been a staple for Topps for the last dozen years, one card for each World Series win by the winning team.   Even with those four extra cards, there is still a whopping 16 more Dodger cards in the Series 1 base set. Here they are:   I'm not sure if I have a favorite card out of that crew. I'm probably going to have to give it time and see what ends up in Series 2. Among the notable items are the "Hands Up...

That is beautiful. Another reason to like the 2015 Topps set. So much BLUE . Those are all of the Dodgers base cards that I received from Nachos Grande's 2015 Topps group break. The Dodgers have 12 cards in Series 1 and I received at least seven of each card  -- and 8 of Yasiel Puig and Joc Pederson -- so you're looking at exactly 100 Dodgers cards. The image is cropped, but trust me they're all there. For a closer study of the 12 Dodgers in Series 1, here is a better look at the crookedly scanned 12: I am happy to say that, unlike the Braves set, the majority of the Dodgers players in Series 1 are still with the team. Only Matt Kemp is elsewhere at this point. The designated rookie -- since every team must have one in Topps the last few years -- is actually two players, Yimi Garcia and Joc Pederson. I'm banking on at least one of them doing better than the 2010 Topps designated Dodger rookie -- Carlos Monasterios. As for my favorite card of the bunc...