where's the puzzle?

i recently picked up one of my "most wanted" cards - a 2023 panini donruss duke snider card

from the diamond kings subset. it was on my nefarious nine list because it was a card that i had a parallel of (holo purple)

but not the base which is an annoyance to me.

the card reminds me of the first time donruss included snider in a set, way back in 1984

when he was the subject of their puzzle insert as well. no puzzle this time, and no logo on the hat, either.

that kepshire cat

kurt kepshire appeared in 51 major league games in his career, which spanned from the fourth of july, 1984 until april 23, 1986. he pitched in dodger stadium in three of those games. luckily for my collection, photos of him from those away games against the dodgers made their way on to cardboard. here's his 1985 donruss card:

and his 1985 fleer card:

the shadows on the donruss card provide some drama to the image. both of these photos came from his relief appearance (second big league appearance) on july 8 of '84 and were almost assuredly taken from the camera well adjacent to the dodger dugout.

that camera well is visible on kepshire's teammate tommy herr's 1985 fleer card

and other parts of dodger stadium show up on other cardinal cards, like art howe's

and lonnie smith's

in fact, dodger stadium is fairly prevalent on non-dodger cards in 1985 fleer. a few months ago, i went through my complete sets of fleer and donruss from 1985 (along with some other scattered cards) and found some dodger stadium cards i didn't already have in the mini-collection to track down doubles of for it.

dodger stadium is here, on glenn davis' half of his rookie card

that's the right field pavilion showing up in the backtround. in addition, many mets are featured on the dodger stadium field, including brent gaff

ron gardenhire

jose oquendo

and walt terrell

traditionally with fleer in the early 1980's, it was the braves who seemed to get dodger stadium background on their cards most often. here's old friend terry forster

up along the first base line, and another old friend in jerry royster

closer to home plate.

dodger nemesis chris chambliss is probably pretty close to the batting cage

which is exactly where steve yeager is hanging out

i finally added a dupe of the yeager card to my dodger stadium collection.

back to donruss, they produced some pretty cool cards with dodger stadium backgrounds in 1984, like ryne sandberg's

and ozzie smith's

i think i put the sandberg in my name/number on the back collection though.

kepshire had some company in 1985 donruss as well, including teammate ralph citarella

who must have annoyed someone at the card company for them to choose that photo.

here's dave von ohlen, the pride of flushing, ny

who wound up pitching for the cardinals and a's instead of his hometown mets. he was 0-1 lifetime at shea, by the way. 

speaking of the mets, here's mike fitzgerald

in dodger stadium with the centerfield edge of the right field pavilion showing. these days, that section of lower seats near fitzgerald's right ear is blocked off from spectators.

one of the the centerfield speakers is visible behind atlee hammaker

and bill laskey is shown 

as seen from the visitor dugout camera well.

future dodger john tudor

makes an appearance as does long time nl west rival dave concepcion

i picked up concepcion's leaf card, too.

it was a good time going through these sets that don't show up on the blogs too often. i'll finish the post up with one more kepshire card

looks like kepshire got too much sun or perhaps is blushing because of the dodger stadium usherette in the background. i think he only has six major league cards - topps, donruss, and fleer from both 1985 and 1986 - meaning that half of them feature photos from dodger stadium. i am happy to have them all!

saxy time!

i was reviewing my want lists from 1990 recently when i saw the score mcdonald's set. i didn't know much about the set, but i was surprised that i had steve sax listed as a need. i knew that he wasn't a dodger in 1989 or 1990, but thought that maybe he was featured as a dodger and that was why i included him in my team set needs. a quick search confirmed that sax was not a dodger in that set, so i figured i could delete him from my list.

however, i found an image of the card and saw that sax was given a double play card, 

so i bought one anyway. check out the cobra bearing down! also note the batting glove hanging out of sax's pocket. when i was in high school in the mid to late 80's, i used to have my batting gloves in my pocket so that the fingers flapped around just like saxy.

the dodger team set turned out to consist only of ramon martinez

so i have now completed that set.

i also added an ozzie guillen card

because he, too, was featured turning two.

these cards are fairly scarce, as they were apparently a test run in idaho of all places. maybe they figured that if baseball cards could be sold in idaho fast food restaurants, they could be sold anywhere.

the remainder of this post is all about sax. he was my favorite dodger from the time steve garvey left prior to the 1983 season to the time that he, himself left for the american league after the 1988 season. here are the cards that i have in my "favorite dodger through the years" mini-collection to mark sax's reign:

1983 fleer

1984 donruss

1985 topps

1986 donruss

1987 fleer all-star

1988 topps

sax ended his dodger tenure on a high note with a world championship. in fact, his dodger career was bookended with world series wins in 1981 as well as 1988. sax, of course, played a much larger role in the 1988 title, and i will always remember how pumped he was when he hit the first pitch of the dodgers' 1988 season over the fence for a home run against the giants. super saxy!

my favorite cards of the year - 1984 edition

i recently introduced my mini collection focusing on my favorite cards from each year that i've been a collector. the basic gist is that i wanted to create a space for the cards that i most appreciated having in my collection in the year that they were released. these were cards that i acquired in the year that they were issued, and that i considered to be my favorites at the time. i have disallowed (most) cards that are already in other mini collections in order to avoid having a mini collection consisting of more steve garvey, double plays, and dodger stadium cards.

my friends and i were more excited about the donruss set in 1984 than the fleer or topps sets for the first time ever. all three sets had the hottest rookies - mattingly and strawberry - but donruss had the rated rookies. of course, they had included rated rookies in their 1983 set, but put the designations on the back where noone paid it any mind. in 1984, they put the designation on the front with a nice design and had those cards at the front of the set. as excitied as we were about those cards, however, my favorites from back then were not rated rookies, although they both come from the "postmark" set.

favorite non-dodger card: donruss living legends a (carl yastrzemski and johnny bench)

i think i've mentioned before that when my dad and i would open packs together, he made me put the cards in number order as we went along, or at least in stacks of cards by number - one stack for cards numbered 1-99, another for cards 100-199, and so on. i remember finding this card in a pack and turning it over to see where it belonged and being dumbstruck by the "a" numbering. the card didn't show up on the checklist and we were confused. we later found the other living legends card of gaylord perry and rollie fingers and saw it was numbered "b" and so we kept looking for "c". well, there was no card "c" but i was happy to have this card that featured two all-time greats who ended their careers with the 1983 season. i was disappointed that they didn't get regular final tribute cards in the set, but that disappointment was offset by the new concept of "inserts".

favorite dodger card: donruss duke snider

the first donruss puzzle was from their 1982 set, and featured babe ruth. the next year, it was ty cobb. i wasn't sure who to expect in 1984, but i sure wasn't thinking of duke snider! i thought it was great that a dodger would be the third subject chosen, and so i immediately hoped for a double of this card so i could have one for the team collection (we were set builders then, first and foremost). luckily, i found a duplicate and not even sid fernandez's rated rookie designation could knock this duke snider card off of my favorite dodger card pedestal. of course, it helped that fernandez was a met by the time i saw his rated rookie card, but still.

up next, 2005. stay tuned!