it's a hooton-anny

there was a point a few months ago when autograph cards from 2004 upper deck legends timeless teams (one of my favorite sets, don't you know) were popping up on ebay with amazing frequency. i believe it was a handful of sellers likely liquidating their cache of the cards, but whatever was going on, i picked up some burt hooton cards to add to my dodger collection.

hooton is featured twice in the set, with the 1977 and 1981 dodgers, and i am now the proud owner of the gold autographs of both versions

slightly less impressive is the non-auto gold parallel i added of his 1977 subset card

and then this bronze parallel of his 1981 subset card

is bringing the excitement down a bit. not too much, though, because even these cards are tough to come by.

in addition to feeding my dodger collection, i am also always looking for parallels - autos or numbered - to add to my master set build. so, i also picked up some cards of hooton's former pitching staff mates tommy john

and don sutton

in bronze form.

not to be outdone, one of hooton's contemporaries also joined my collection of bronze parallels from the set

hooton and steve carlton pitched against each other nine times according to baseball reference. carlton came out on top with a 3-2 record against hooton's 2-3 record in those games, although hooton did fire a 3-hit shutout against carlton and the phillies in 1975.

i have no illusions of ever completing any of the parallel sets (which include the unnumbered silver autos, gold autos #/5, the platinum autos #/1, and the bronze non-autos /50 and gold non-autos /5) but i am super close to having at least one of every dodger silver auto. i only need tommy john's 1974 card to finish that off, but i also need two of the four steve garvey cards to put in my dodger collection as i feed the garvey pc first.  speaking of the senate candidate, i found a third copy of his 1981 card

to put with the autograph "set" that i am working on/not working on.

similarly, i picked up a second copy of ron cey's certified auto of his 1974 card

that uses a non-1974 photo for the autograph "set".  the gold auto parallel that i also added 

stays in the dodger collection, as does this al downing gold auto parallel

which has so far remained in its slab. i love the memorable moments gold and bronze parallels, although the gold autos are the best.

most recently, i added a gold auto parallel of steve yeager

who was one of hooton's dodger battery mates, and a gold auto parallel of bert blyleven

who faced hooton when he was with the pirates, and then again when he was in cleveland and hooton was finishing up his career as a texas ranger.

last but certainly not least, i added a regular silver autograph card of vida blue

to my collection. it just so happened that i purchased this card just before he passed away. i became a fan of his in my early collecting days when i started picking up a's cards from the early 1970's. i am really happy to finally have a certified auto card of his in my collection.

all told, i now have 168 of the 300 cards in the set in my partial silver autograph set, plus another 18 dodgers that are in my dodger collection but not the "set" collection, if that makes sense. each of the unique cards in my collection are shown in this post. as for hooton, i am still looking for one of his bronze parallels and both unsigned gold parallels. hopefully there are more sellers out there looking to clear their collections of these cards!