smooth sailing out of los angeles

as a team collector, i don't typically avoid dodger cards in bargain bins unless i am certain that i already own them. i do pause, however, when i find parallels of guys like dennis santana, which was the case at a show last year. i wound up bringing home these 2019 panini donruss optic and 2019 topps parallels

but i would have preferred them to be of a current dodger. 

santana seems to have found his groove in pittsburgh which makes me happy. the dodgers in recent years have been quick to jettison young talent that they have developed in exchange for other teams' talent. in santana's case, they dealt him to the rangers for a minor league pitcher who toiled in the dodgers' minor league system through last season, and is now a free agent. i get that they are dealing from a surplus, but i still appreciate the older dodger way that allows me to collect and cheer for "homegrown" players for an extended period of time, as with clayton kershaw or will smith.

other dodgers whose departures i understood but to some degree regretted include joc pederson 

that's a 2016 topps update 500 home run futures club insert. spoiler alert - joc won't get close to 500 homers, but he hit some big ones for the dodgers and i am glad he is no longer in the national league west so i can root for him a little more.

cody bellinger, seen here on a 2022 panini prizm illumination insert

and a 2022 topps 1987 insert black parallel

was another one that was tough to see move on in free agency even though his performance with the dodgers in his last years had not warranted a big contract. i hope he has a nice season for the yankees but is at home in october. i do think the game is more fun when the yankees are good, but i really want the blue jays to get another crack at a title.

i was ready to be a ryan pepiot fan, but adding a proven starter in tyler glasnow was a deal too good for the dodgers to pass up. pepiot's 2022 topps chrome update purple refractor

was the last one i needed for that dodger team set of parallels.

just a couple of weeks ago, it was announced by the rays that pepiot was headed to the il and replaced on the 40 man roster by michael grove, seen here on a 2023 topps chrome sepia parallel

grove is also injured at the moment. i was ready to be a fan of his as well, but now all i will have are random cards to find at shows.

another example of a short time dodger that had a lot of cards available for me to collect is miguel vargas. this is his 2024 topps yellow parallel

and i am sure i will be finding vargas dodger cards in bargain boxes for years to come. will i buy them? time will tell. adding tommy edman and michael kopech in the trade that sent vargas to the white sox was a great move by the dodger front office, so i hope that vargas finds his way in chicago and lives up to a bit of the hype that surrounded him in his earliest dodger days to pay back that championship level deal that is currently a bust for the sox.

gavin stone, seen here on his 2023 topps chrome update refractor

and landon knack, shown on his 2025 topps gold parallel

are still dodgers as of now. they are both on the injured list, and who knows what will happen once they are healthy. there's not a lot of room on the pitching staff at the moment, so it's possible that these two become trade bait once they prove themselves healthy. i hope not, especially knack who i like, but i get it if it is the case.

and then there are guys like dalton rushing. 

his 2025 panini donruss card is one of many that i already have of him, and who knows how long he will be a dodger? blocked by his fellow university of louisville alum will smith, who is signed to a long-term deal, and too good to be in triple-a, he's not getting a lot of playing time. so far this year he is playing very well when he does play, but is it just enough to entice another team to make an offer that fills a different dodger need later in the season?

we will have to wait and find out who will join the likes of santana in the former dodger makes good elsewhere camp, and then subsequently haunts the bargain boxes and collections of team collectors like me.

mall rats and giveaway winners

yesterday morning i took some time to check out the near-to-me mall show that sets up a few times a year. they always include the weekend before christmas in their schedule and i wanted to only show up at the very start of the show for a couple of reasons. one, there was a club show on saturday which is more predictable in terms of product, and two, i want to avoid malls this time of year during later hours and actual weekends. however, i wasn't able to get there until the early afternoon.

to my surprise, the mall wasn't that busy and there were a lot more tables set up than the last mall show i attended in october. unfortunately, there were very few diggable boxes of any interest to me. hence, the "rats" in the title post.

i made a couple of laps and did manage to find some cards to bring home, and in hindsight i am not too disappointed! while i purchased cards from four sellers, i am only going to share cards from one of them.

this 2023 topps chrome james outman card

is a "radiating rookies" insert

and i was told it was a case hit. same for this 2025 topps chrome mookie betts lightning leaders card

i pulled these from a monster box of toploaded cards with no pricing. the guy behind the table said that he would price cards from the box at one or two bucks, typically. i built a short stack that included this 2025 topps heritage alcs/nlcs yellow parallel

and a couple of parallels from 2024 topps stadium club - sepia jackie robinson and gold foil roy campanella

the campanella isn't numbered, but the gold foils look like they should be. this 2023 topps gilded collection rookies cast in gold card of james outman

is numbered - /199.

as for non-dodgers, i did grab some of those, too. here's a gold parallel from 2025 topps update of the brent rooker/lawrence butler combo card

it's a nice looking card, and the back

namechecks big mac and golden gopher great terry steinbach, along with jimmie foxx and the immortal bob johnson.

here's a 2025 topps vintage stock parallel of marco gonzales

with the back

all dressed up for christmas.

i had no reason to choose this 2025 topps josh rojas card

which is a memorial day camo parallel, numbered to 25

but it didn't rocket up the cost of the rest of the cards, so i left it in my purchase.

last card i will show is this 2025 topps lucas erceg team color border parallel

and speaking of teams and parallels...

earlier on friday, i randomized the list of names/teams from my giveaway post earlier in the week. i was a bit surprised to see so many entries and decided to bump things up to four winners as a result. here are the standard three randomizations:

with the winners being tony, tom, mark, and crh614. be sure to email me your addresses at gcrl at comcast dot net  (even you, tom, just so i can be sure i have the current one). 

keep in mind that these are "above and beyond my normal number of mailings" mailings, meaning that there will be other mailings sent, too. if anyone else in the list above wants to send me their address, i'll pull a couple of cards for them as well.  

all told, the stack of cards i pulled from the seller were priced at $30 which was just above $2/card and i thought a pretty good deal given the scarcity of some of the cards i pulled. he didn't have any change, so i added a couple of scrub autos from his box to get to $40. one of the autos i grabbed was this 2025 topps edgardo henriquez card

the other one is going out to one of the randomized winners.

the k is for kershaw kountdown continues - nattys iced edition!

clayton kershaw made his seventh appearance of the 2025 season friday night against the nationals at dodger stadium, so i am pleased to be able to post another edition of the k is for kershaw kountdown as we track his progress to the 3,000 strikeout milestone.

coming off his best start of the season, kershaw went five innings, allowing two runs and striking out four nats in the process. those 4 k's he recorded bring his season strikeout total to 24, and his career total to 2,992.

in honor of his performance, here are four cards (not seen on this blog before) from my collection to represent strikeouts number 2,989 through 2,992.

2,989 - 2023 topps chrome refractor

2,990 - 2023 topps chrome pink refractor

2,991 - 2023 topps chrome prism refractor

2,992 - 2023 topps chrome sepia refractor

yes, i was waiting for a four-strikeout game so i could show these four refractor parallels in the same post.

kershaw's night included allowing two solo homers to account for the nationals' runs against him, and he allowed three other hits and walked a pair to go with his four strikeouts. one of the home runs was hit by old friend (two-time old freind) amed rosario who is hitting .385 when facing kershaw. regardless, the dodger bullpen was able to hold on to the lead, and kershaw was credited with his third win of the season, and third in his last three starts.

here is a non-kershaw cards - it's a 2023 topps miguel rojas royal blue parallel

rojas and kershaw have history - rojas made a nice defensive play during his first stint as a dodger to preserve kershaw's only career no-hitter back in 2014. on friday, rojas doubled and homered behind kershaw, with his home run accounting for the game winning rbi as the nationals were able to give the dodgers a scare before falling 6-5.

kershaw is still in 20th place on the all-time leader board, and he will remain there unless he passes john smoltz (or is himself passed). smoltz has a career strikeout total of 3,084 and so kershaw is now 92 k's behind smoltz, but just 8 away from the 3,000 milestone. for what it's worth, he now has 215 career wins, which puts him in a tie for 91st place overall with jim perry and stan coveleski.

kershaw should be back on the mound next week against the royals, assuming the dodgers stay with a six man rotation now that ohtani is back. otherwise, it's possible that kershaw will close out the series against the rockies before the dodgers head to kc. know that when he makes his next start, i will be back to update the kountdown soon thereafter. stay tuned! 

batting around with some fun facts

i am always happy to participate in a good ol' blog bat around! in diamond jesters original post yesterday, matt wrote about a series of fun statistical facts that were not intuitive based on our primary conception of certain players, even bringing it back to madison bumgarner to match the original version of the concept. i decided pretty quickly after reading matt's post to give it a try! 

i will start with mookie betts

who has more regular season 3 home run games (6) than reggie jackson (2)

who has as many championship series home runs (6) as kiké hernandez (6)

who has finished more regular season games as a pitcher (6) than walker buehler (5)

who has more career home runs (1) than don sutton (0)

who hit fewer batters with a pitch (82) than madison bumgarner (89)

for reference, don sutton had 1,559 plate appearances to walker buehler's 195, and sutton faced 21,631 batters while bumgarner only pitched to 9,098 batters.

this was pretty fun. the only stat i was aware of before i started was that betts had more 3 homer games than mr. october - the other facts i discovered along the way. baseball reference truly is the greatest website.

thanks for the inspiration matt!

h-town card show, part 2

i'm here to wrap up my visit last month to planet houston and the hotel card show i attended. yesterday's post covered my pick-ups from the first few dealers i worked with, and now here is the rest!

the next dealer i found had a quarter box filled with topps inserts and topps on demand releases. i took 37 cards from him, and he charged me 8 bucks.

here's a lot of 2022 topps 582 montgomery cards from 2020-21 set 1 and 2022 set 2

plus six more from 2022 set 3

and here is a pair of red sox from 2021 topps brooklyn collection

i knew that i already had the ichiro card because of the duke snider mural in the background - i had added the card to my dodger stadium mini-collection as soon as i first saw the card online. i didn't realize, however, that i also already had the trea turner card.

i did find some other dodgers that i did need here, too, including this 2022 topps a&g x freddie freeman mini

i had more luck with dodgers at the next stop. this was a guy in a braves hat who said his boxes were 50% off the marked prices. i made away with 48 cards for a total of 20 bucks. highlights included a 2021 topps update dj peters vintage stock parallel

a 2020 topps heritage 50th anniversary buyback of wes parker's 1971 topps card

a pair of color parallels of clayton kershaw from 2021 topps big league

and 2022 panini donruss optic

a pair of jackie robinson short prints

from 2021 topps gypsy queen and 2010 topps national chicle, respectively, and a pair of autographs from a couple of 2019 topps products

of dennis santana. santana most recently pitched for the yankees, and i will admit that i was a bit sad to see the dodgers get to him during the first two games of their series in new york. after the second game, in which santana was pulled and replaced by a position player, it seemed pretty clear his time was up and the next day the yankees dfa'd him. fortunately, like mitch white in yesterday's post, santana was picked up by a nl central team - in his case, the brewers.

i added five more dodger cards from another seller for 10 bucks, and i was happy with that price. i figured that he would be asking for that much for this card alone - 2024 topps shohei ohtani/mookie betts checklist

i think topps is playing fast and loose with what a hug is. maybe their copy editor has some issues.

the other four cards were inserts and parallels from stadium club chrome and topps chrome releases

at least half of which are unnecessary, but i remain the fool that buys them (on the secondary market).

next up i stopped at a dealer who had pretty much only texas team items and dug through a short stack (is there any other kind?) of jose altuve cards for a trading partner who collects the astro 2nd baseman. i found four cards for 2 bucks, and i am keeping one from 2022 panini donruss optic

since it's a double play turn!

then i stopped at another table and dug through a couple of rows of a monster box that was ambiguously priced. i was on my way out so i didn't look too seriously but, did pick out two autographed cards which totaled 10 bucks, one of which was this 1997 bowman karim garcia auto

he gave them both to me for five which was nice. i guess there is also a "blue ink" version of the garcia card, but i will count my collection complete with this one.

i made one more stop, figuring that i should see if i could pick up some 1955 bowman. there was an older couple with some vintage stacks, including cards from the tv set. i picked out a few and offered ten bucks. the toploaders that the cards were in had prices on them, and ten bucks was a pretty good discount. the guy looked at the cards and countered with the full marked price.  i then reduced my ask to two cards which had a total marked price of six bucks and asked if he would take five. he looked at them and told me "six dollars". it was then that i realized he was hard of hearing. i held up five fingers and he said ok and so i was able to cross off st. paul native fred baczewsi and gil coan

from the want list as i work towards completing the set. i'm making some decent strides in that regard but still have a ways to go.

big thanks to houston for hosting a show that coincided with one of my visits. i have plans to be there again, but don't see any shows scheduled during that time which is too bad for me because i really did have a good time.