still scratching that 17 year itch

it wasn't too long after i had completed the 2007 topps chrome dodger team set that i decided to go after the blue refractor parallels. the base chrome cards seemed pretty lackluster, and with the chunky borders, the blue refractors were fantastically blue! it took me a while, but i got there, and i recently finished off the regular refractor and white refractor team sets, too.

here's the base dodger team set for comparison purposes later on.

j.d drew, andre ethier, rafael furcal

jeff kent, brad penny, juan pierre

chad billingsley, jason schmidt, matt kemp

randy wolf, takashi saito, russell martin

derek lowe, greg maddux, delwyn young  

the black borders don't do the base chrome any favors, and shame on topps (and other companies at the time) for including autographs as base cards.

now here is the blue refractor team set - note that there was no delwyn young card in the blue refractor style

j.d drew, andre ethier, rafael furcal

jeff kent, brad penny, juan pierre

chad billingsley, jason schmidt, matt kemp

randy wolf, takashi saito, russell martin

derek lowe, greg maddux  

having the blue refractors but not the regular refractors gnawed on me a bit, so i got that job done.

j.d drew, andre ethier, rafael furcal

jeff kent, brad penny, juan pierre

chad billingsley, jason schmidt, matt kemp

randy wolf, takashi saito, russell martin

derek lowe, greg maddux, delwyn young                

much, much brighter, of course. the young card is numbered to 500 in refractor form.

now for the white border refractors

j.d drew, andre ethier, rafael furcal

jeff kent, brad penny, juan pierre

chad billingsley, jason schmidt, matt kemp

randy wolf, takashi saito, russell martin

derek lowe, greg maddux, delwyn young    

the "pop" on these is largely background dependent. speaking of backgrounds, there was no nomar garciaparra chrome card in 2007, but he is in the background of chad billingsley's card.

the white refractors are numbered to 660 - hard to see on the scanned card back

but the delwyn young auto is only numbered to 200

interestingly enough, i have no xfractors in my collection. maybe that's next. or, the red refractor parallels. there is always something to chase!

1955 bowman complete through 104!

my 1955 bowman set is coming together at a decent pace, and i've completed a few more front end sheets to share.

here is sheet 12, cards 89 through 96

hall of famer lou boudreau is probably the biggest name here, but hank thompson's card gave me the toughest time to acquire. andy seminick seems out of place as he upsets the teammate pairing, but that is becoming more common as we progress through the set.

here are the backs:

it's nice to see sal maglie's nickname mentioned on the back of his card, but there is only one non-narrative card back here. on the back of art ditmar's card, he shares several of his biggest baseball thrills, including his first big league win that came on the last day of the 1954 season. that means that ditmar is the last pitcher to record a win for the philadelphia athletics, as they relocated to kansas city for the 1955 season. staying on that topic, jim hunter was the last kansas city a's pitcher to win a game, and j.t. ginn holds that distinction for the oakland version of the a's.

here is sheet 13, cards 97 through 104

this is a great sheet of cards with johnny podres, jim gilliam, jerry coleman, bobby thomson, and eddie mathews. on this sheet, it's don johnson who is out of place and messing up the teammate duos.

here are the backs:

ted williams, who is famously absent from this set, is namechecked on the back of thomson's card as the best hitter thomson has ever seen.

the don johnson card is one of the cards in the set that has an error variation. the one shown above is the correct version, with this being the error

that is ernie johnson showed there. ernie obviously pitched for the braves, while don was an oriole. the back of the card is still don's

and this error is reversed on card number 157. i hope to get there with these posts very soon!

poser

i was looking through cards in my scanned folder over the weekend and i noticed a few duke snider cards in there. i've posted this one before

it's from 2004 topps tribute and shows snider in the latter brooklyn dodger years with his hands on his knees. then i noticed another card, this one from 2005 donruss signature series

that shows him in the same pose. it's clearly a different photo, but the same pose.

then i saw his 2012 topps tribute and triple threads cards (bronze and sepia, respectively)

and again noted the similar poses in different photos.

none of this is shocking, as there are only so many poses that players can strike (like suttoning), and with the proliferation of card releases we are seeing more photos - or more of the same photo.  this 2021 topps finest legacies insert

recycles one of the snider images and pairs it with a cody bellinger action shot.

action shots are the name of the game these days outside of sets like allen & ginter and parts of stadium club. i wouldn't mind a few more posed shots (with their natural background unlike heritage sets from the recent past) mixed in. 

tommy john is in my hall of famer collection

with jim kaat's induction into cooperstown, i've decided to move tommy john into my hall of famer collection. here's his 1999 fleer sports illustrated greats of the game autograph collection card which represents him the collection:

and here's the back:

because it shows john as a dodger (which is mostly how i remember him), this is the second version of this card in my collection.

i recognize that kaat was elected by the "golden era" committee and john was previously subjected to the "modern era" committee (it wasn’t clear to me whether john would be considered today under the "classic baseball era" committee or the "contemporary baseball era" committee as 1980 is the dividing line between the two but the recent announcement from the hall of fame noting that john would be on the classic era committee’s ballot next month makes it clear now) but to me they were peers who pitched for a long time and fell short of the magic 300-win milestone. nolan ryan is the only person whose career spanned more seasons than john's, and only ryan and john had longer careers than kaat. both john and kaat lost some time to injuries during their primes, and both bounced back (john from the revolutionary ligament replacement surgery that bears his name) to excel at the highest level.

over the course of their careers, john won 288 games and kaat 283, although john remained a starter to the end while kaat spent the last few years as a reliever. john had fewer losses and a lower era even though he pitched about 180 more innings than kaat, while kaat had more strikeouts and complete games. both received cy young consideration at times, with john twice placing second in the voting. looking at modern analytics, john has kaat bested in both bwar and fwar.

considered independently, john is a hall of very good pitcher who pitched for a long time and has a unique place in baseball history as a guinea pig of sorts. i didn't see him as a hall of famer unlike, say, bert blyleven, who also fell short of 300 wins but retired with the third highest strikeout total in history. however, with kaat's election, i believe that the door is open for john and am not really sure what the criteria would be to keep him out at this point other than the subjectivity of era committee voters. time will tell, as even 35 years after a career came to an end there is hope.

remember, you can find my hall of famer collection in its entirety here at my want list site.

mirror refraction

if it wasn't topps or upper deck, i pretty much ignored it during the 1990's. as such, i missed out on the bowman craze, although i did finally buy a pack of 1992 bowman in 1997 for too much money. and yes, i know bowman is made by topps, but it is separated in my mind even as i consider stadium club to be "topps stadium club" and finest to be "topps finest" unlike most collector reference materials. at any rate, i have no recollection of when i first learned about bowman's best, but i do know that finding refractor parallels was not easy.

these days, there are traders like sluggo who send me things, and one card that arrived recently was this 1997 bowman's best mirror image refractor parallel

it's more of a craig biggio card than a wilton guerrero card, but i'll take it! and wait - there's more

chuck knoblauch and donnie sadler are featured, too.

projecting rookies, or even young players in general, is always tough, and neither guerrero nor sadler came close to the accomplishments of biggio or knoblauch, but they still had careers that spanned several seasons. these cards are snapshots in time and i am glad to have this one in my collection

the other dodger rookies in this set are paul konerko who was paired with mark mcgwire, and adrian beltre who shared space with chipper jones. not sure if i will ever find those refractors.

thanks sluggo!

meaningful to the max

i had meant to add a max meyer card to my "meaningful and just because" collection a while back, and then i found this 2023 topps red foil parallel

showed up at a show and now here we are.

he missed all of 2023 but returned in 2024 and started the season fairly strong. he was sent down but returned later in the season but finished the year on the injured list if i recall correctly. with all the changes going on in miami, i assume meyer is still a part of their future plans but only time will tell.

the reason i wanted one of his cards is that he is from the city in which i live, and my son played against him in travel ball and high school. not good results, but there is no shame in being a strikeout victim of a future major leaguer! as for me, i don't recall facing any future big league pitchers, but i was teammates with one and once struck out a future dodger minor leaguer while in babe ruth baseball. i should find one of that guy's cards for my collection!

sometimes it doesn't cut both ways

a few months ago, i ordered this 1992 topps archives bazooka 4-in-1 card from an online seller

it features jackie robinson and his fantastic 1953 topps card, but the card itself is terribly miscut. the seller used stock images as i recall, so i didn't know that the one i would receive would be this off centered. it wasn't worth returning, and it doesn't bother me to keep this card in my dodger collection.

the reason for the post is that i was amazed to turn the card over and see this:

the back is pretty well centered!

i suppose it makes sense depending on how cards were printed but it was still a surprise given most of the other miscuts i've seen. the only one like it that i can think of having seen is this 1982 o-pee-chee len barker card

that i found in a dime box a long time ago. it has quite the reverse problem

and this is why you turn cards over!

with a name like that, there better be three

with trey treutel leaving cardboard connection several months ago, i haven't found it as easy to keep up with new card releases. i know ryan cracknell has the same sort of calendar going at beckett that trey had at cardboard connection, but for whatever reason i find it harder to review routinely.

what i am getting at is that i didn't know there was such a set as 2023 leaf trinity until i started seeing cards show up in my saved steve garvey searches on ebay. this was in the latter half of 2024, mind you, and it seems like the release of the set has been staggered in terms of card packaging because a couple of months after picking up my first card from the set, i started to see other types of cards (unique to certain box types) show up. really weird.

anyway, i wound up with three cards from the set. the first one i picked up was this "divinity" autograph card of steve garvey

the divinity cards are sticker autos and it looks like they have a max print run of 10, so i was glad to find this at a nice price.

when the other cards started showing up, i decided to buy this "steel" insert

which is actually a "stars and dots" parallel. or at least that is what the seller said. kudos to leaf for using two different garvey photos, even if they are pretty similar.  here's the back

which mentions garvey's unsuccessful senate run and shows that the print run is 49 for this particular parallel.

the third card i added was this one

dual steves! a steve sax and steve garvey "duos" dual autograph card! this is the platinum parallel, and features a third different image of the garv! these cards were some of the first i saw from the set, but i waited quite a while before one popped up with a favorable buy it now price.

ok, so i decided not to limit myself to three cards from the trinity set, as i figured i should probably own garvey's base card

even though it features the same photo as the divinity card. the back has the same writeup as the steel card above

but the steel card is not a parallel of the base card. speaking of the steel parallels, i've seen a bunch more pop up recently but i am holding my ground and not even thinking about adding more. yet.

how greats is this?!

not too long ago, i was able to score a trio of autograph cards for my dodger collection. they come from one of my favorite retired player sets of all-time, 2001 fleer greats of the game. here are roger craig, joe black, and preacher roe

it was great to see fleer include these players, black and roe in particular, in a few sets during the early part of the century as they didn't get a whole lot of cardboard time prior to then.

black (the 1952 national league rookie of the year) and roe were teammates in brooklyn from 1952 through 1954 (roe was there starting in 1948), and craig and black were teammates for a short time in 1955 prior to black being traded to cincinnati.

with these three cards, i am down to only needing two to complete my team set of autographs from this particular release. of course, the two i need are duke snider and tommy lasorda, the latter of whom i believe is a short print. onward!

things really were pretty bad in '92

the 1992 dodgers were the worst team in franchise history other than a couple of the brooklyn superbas teams from earlier in the century. they lost 99 games and had the worst record in the league for only the second time in franchise history. in fact, they had the worst record in the majors but still missed out on the first overall pick (alex rodriguez) due to the stupid alternating league rule at the time.

as a reminder of how bad this team was, there were no dodger pitchers in 1992 with a winning record, mike sharperson was the team's all-star representative, and only one player had double digit home run totals. sure, that was rookie of the year eric karros, but still.

this 1993 donruss long ball leaders card of darryl strawberry

is a recent addition to my collection, and it shares some information about the dodgers' ineptitude in 1992 on the back:

72 home runs as a team is pretty poor. after karros and his 20 homers, the next highest total on the team belonged to mitch webster and dave hansen with six apiece. thankfully, mike piazza would show up the next season to start launching baseballs all over the place.

by the way, even though this is a fairly sad dodger card thanks to strawberry being "plagued by injuries" and the display of the dodgers' home run ineptitude, i need another one of these for the dodger stadium collection - can you help a blogger out?