mariano rivera is in my hall of famer collection

it took a while, but i've finally added the only unanimously elected hall of famer to my hall of famer collection. here's the card representing mariano rivera in said collection:

that's a 2015 topps finest generations autograph, numbered 10/25. here's the back:

rivera took over the yankee closer role from john wetteland and elevated the position to new heights. he is baseball's all-time leader in saves with 652. he won five world series rings and was the mvp of the 1999 fall classic. he also has 42 postseason saves and a 0.70 era over 141 innings of postseason pitching. incredible. and, while he never won a cy young award, he did have five seasons in which he finished in the top 5 in terms of voting for the award.

i got to see him pitch in person just once. it was may 6, 1999 and the yankees were playing the twins at the metrodome. the game went into the 10th inning and the yankees took the lead on a ricky ledee hit. rivera came in and earned the save by getting matt lawton, brent gates, and doug mientkiewicz to each ground out. i don't have a strong memory of the inning, but baseball reference notes that two of the three groundouts were "weak" and the third one was a comebacker.

i did see the yankees play during rivera's final season - 2013 - but he did not get the call in the game that i attended. five years later, he became the first person to receive 100% of the baseball writer votes to gain election to the hall of fame.

as a reminder, you can see rivera and the rest of the players in my hall of famer collection here.

the almost daily dodger - frank howard

you don't see too many frank howard cards being produced these days, and i should have made an effort sooner to acquire this one

which is from the 2022 topps rookie of the year 75th anniversary set. i had found jackie robinson's card from the set at a card show in 2023 but continued to neglect the rest of the set. then, i found three of the other four dodgers at another card show

and decided to track down howard to complete the set.

howard, who passed away one year ago today, was the dodgers' fifth rookie of the year, and the first from their time in los angeles. his 23 home runs as a rookie in 1960 cracked the league's top ten but he wouldn't lead the league in that category until he was with the washington senators in the late 1960's.

in 1993, mike piazza passed howard by hitting 35 home runs as a rookie for the dodgers. his team record stood until cody bellinger came along in 2017 and hit 39. for two years, that was also a national league record, but then along came pete alonso. for the record, corey seager, the other dodger featured in this post, hit 26 dingers as a rookie in 2016.

bust a move

not too long ago i got an email from bo at baseball card breakdown. he said he had a sandy koufax card to trade. 

he said it was a '63 jello. and asked if i would like to own that fine fellow. i replied without a second to lose, and what comes next? a pwe trade!

here is the aforementioned koufax

classically cut by someone working with scissors in an amateur style, but it's still a 1963 sandy koufax card. as an aside, i was thankful for my dad having a paper cutter at his office where we would go to cut up the topps team card sets that i sent away for in the late 1970s and early 1980s. we didn't buy hostess products (certainly not boxes of them) so i don't recall cutting any cards off of boxes as a young collector.

the card references sandy's no-hitter against the mets and other accomplishments achieved in 1962 as he was just starting the dominance that led to him becoming the legendary pitcher he is known to have been today. sandy is approaching his 89th birthday but still looks good. he's been shown on tv at a few dodger games this past season and i hope he is able to make it out for some clayton kershaw starts next year.

unexpectedly, but not surprisingly, bo included a few more cards to keep koufax company on his way to my mailbox. he sent a few albuquerque dukes from the 1991 line drive set to get me closer to a team set. here's billy bean

and john wetteland

who are a couple of the more recognizable names from that dukes team. it's not quite the same as the 1981 dukes set which had a bunch of dodger prospects like mike marshall, greg brock, and candy maldonado. plus a pitching coach named sandy koufax, although claude osteen is in the 1991 set in the role formerly handled by koufax.

bo also included a 1990 topps kaybee kings jack morris card

this is my first look at these - i think i last went into a kaybee store in 1988 or 1989. bo saw that this card shows morris' number 47 and is a better balanced card than the 1982 fleer card i currently have in my retired number collection. i'll give this as a replacement some consideration!

thank you bo! please reach out about cards like this to trade anytime!

i didn’t expect it

the dodgers of recent years have definitely moved from the “make the postseason and anything can happen” mentality to “world series or bust” but having to play the padres in the nlds was a worst case scenario for me in terms of playoff anxiety. i have a couple of friends who are actually padre fans and they were pretty excited given how well the pads played down the stretch and i was resigned to a “bust” season given the injuries to the pitching staff. 

so getting to the nlcs was more than i figured for that version of the 2024 dodgers. even once they made it to the fall classic i was pretty nonchalant about their chances to win it all. freeman’s game 1 homer gave me hope and ice cube and clutch hits had me fired up but it was only when they went up by three games that i started to worry that it might actually slip away. ohtani’s shoulder injury in game 2 and the patchwork rotation requiring the game 4 bullpen game didn’t instill a lot of confidence. knowing that gerritt cole was waiting with game 5 made matters worse.  

even though i was traveling, i was able to follow game 5 through various means and ultimately watch the bottom of the ninth from the delta sky club at lax with some other displaced dodger fans. seeing walker buehler strike out alex verdugo was glorious.

so it’s another commissioner’s trophy for the dodgers 

and there can be no denying by the 2020 naysayers like verdugo that this one is legit. beating the yankees in the postseason is the best dodger baseball there is and now the franchises are even head to head in my lifetime. 

by the way, hearing vin scully’s 1988 game 1 call imposed on video of freeman’s at bat was and is spectacular. to steal another scully call, if you have a sombrero throw it to the sky!