championship prestige

the dodgers' 2021 postseason begins (and possibly ends) tonight, so i've got a postseason themed post for your perusal.  five times in steve garvey's career, and five times in eleven seasons, he was part of a team that could call itself the national league champion.  in 2005, playoff included parallels celebrating the different levels of postseason access in their prestige release, and i recently acquired the nl champ garvey card:

these cards were found in special factory sets that were only available via exchange with a winning playoff champions combos insert card, like this one

that would have paid off had the dodgers won the world series. i took that image from comc. here's the back:

you can see back then we were still dealing with hard mail-in redemptions and exchanges. the nice thing is that playoff gave collectors until april 15, 2006 (jackie robinson day!) to redeem their cards, so you knew whether or not your card was a winner before mailing it in.

anyway, what my garvey card shown up above means is that someone out there had an astros combo card that named them as the national league champions, and they successfully redeemed the card for a complete 200-card parallel set. according to donruss, the national league champion set is the rarest of the sets, with only 7 having been issued.  here are all the set print run breakdowns:

al wild card champions: 13 sets
nl wild card champions: 15 sets
al west division champions: 17 sets
al central division champions: 27 sets
al east division champions: 20 sets
nl west division champions: 18 sets
nl central division champions: 21 sets
nl east division champions: 18 sets
al champions: 12 Sets
nl champions: 7 sets
world series champions: 19 sets

the only other garvey parallels i have are from the nl central and al east division 

champion sets, which have the second and third highest print run of all the sets. i would love to find an nl west division champion card as well as a world series champion card for my collection, even though these parallels are not numbered and are somewhat derivative. you know what they say - player collectors gonna collect!

factoring in refractors but not at that price

last year i placed a bunch of orders on sportlots. 61 orders to be exact, which has me wondering why i wasn't a bit more organized. sure, some of those orders were placed separately to take advantage of optimizing shipping costs (sometimes it's cheaper to order cards from sellers in separate orders rather than pay a higher shipping cost in a single order) and i did use the box order option a couple of times, but i probably could have done a better job to consolidate some orders.

when it comes to sportlots, i am a proponent of adding cards to max out the shipping cost per card value. for example, if i have 3 cards in my order from a seller, i will add a fourth to get one more card without increasing shipping costs. one way i do this is to search for refractors within sellers' inventory. they are easy to find and easy to confirm a need on my part. as a result, i added quite a few refractors to my dodger collection this way.  here are some of them in no particular order:

2018 topps chrome sapphire logan forsythe

2004 topps chrome refractor shawn green

2006 topps chrome refractor jayson werth

2004 topps chrome refractor todd hundley

2011 topps chrome xfractor matt kemp

2011 topps chrome xfractor andre ethier

2018 topps chrome prism refractor corey seager

2018 topps chrome sapphire dodgers team card

2018 topps chrome sapphire tom koehler

2018 topps chrome pink refractor alex wood

2018 topps chrome pink refractor kenley jansen

2018 topps chrome pink refractor kenta maeda

2018 topps chrome xfractor kenta maeda

2018 topps chrome pink refractor corey seager

2018 topps chrome sapphire chris taylor

2018 topps chrome xfractor justin turner

2018 topps chrome prism refractor alex wood

2018 topps chrome update refractor kenley jansen

2019 topps chrome refractor clayton kershaw

2018 bowman's best refractor clayton kershaw

2018 bowman's best refractor brian dozier

my attempts to maximize shipping backfired a bit, unfortunately. one of the orders i placed that included a couple of these refractors added to get to the seller's shipping limit resulted in the worst sportlots experience i've had in the 9-plus years i've been using the site. i ordered 4 cards in may of 2020 from a seller named jordan25 using the budget shipping method. a week or so later, i received this from my mail carrier:

yes, there was $7.50 due in postage because this seller slapped a tracking number on a pwe.  there was a letter explaining the charge attached to the envelope:

a couple of things there. the letter says the item was being returned, which in hindsight would have been the best thing. however, someone decided to go ahead and deliver it to me postage due. i have a great postal carrier, and i am not blaming him if in fact it was his decision to bring this to me rather than return to sender. i figured that i wanted the cards and that this was clearly a mistake on the part of the seller, so i had no problem accepting the envelope and heading off to sportlots to be reimbursed.

i am not completely sure how the $7.50 amount was arrived at, but i filed an issue with the seller to let him know that the cards had arrived with this postage due. long story short, after a bit of back and forth, he denied my request which, by that time, had been reduced to just the value of the cards (about a buck) since the issue resolution within the sportlots site does not allow for more than that. even the sportlots site moderator pushed back on me, asking if i could have rejected the delivery of the envelope. well, yes, but i assumed that since it was not my mistake i would be reimbursed. anyway, i wound up with no reimbursement and no relief. very frustrating as i was not the dumbass who put a tracking sticker on a pwe. the seller even told me that if i had given him the receipt, he would have reimbursed me (this is after he denied my request). i informed him that the fact that i have the cards is the receipt, but he never responded. 

anyway, i've placed a few orders on the site in 2021 but i think i will try to sell my inventory that is currently listed there (about 50,000 cards) locally on marketplace and be done with it.  no amount of shiny refractor goodness will fully remove the stain of this experience.

and it's all over now, 2007 topps chrome blue

it was just over four years ago that i posted about completing the 2011 topps chrome atomic refractor dodger team set and was turning my attention to completing the 2007 topps chrome blue refractor dodger team set.  at that time, i needed just four more dodger cards, and, for the last two years and three months, i have needed only one.  it has sat at the top of my 'nefarious 9' list of most wanted cards on the sidebar of my blogs for pretty much that entire time. last week, it arrived.

2007 topps chrome takashi saito blue refractor

i had multiple ebay saved searches for this card, with no luck, although i did recently see someone selling a lot of 151 blue refractors, and was considering asking them to pull this card out of the lot for me.  i would also periodically check comc and the beckett marketplace.  more frequently, i would search on sportlots which is where i ultimately found the card.  it had been listed for no more than a week, i would say.  it is strange to many i am sure, but there is so much joy in finding a card that has been so elusive. 

i've received some other blue cards recently:

2005 upper deck jayson werth blue parallel

jon of penny sleeves fame sent the werth with a few other cards. i had to do a little bit of research to figure out exactly what this was, which was good because i learned that the blue parallels were only part of series 2 that year. this fact that helped me understand that the card i have of milton bradley and thought was a blue parallel is really a retro parallel. so thanks jon!

1998 leaf rookies & stars raul mondesi true blue parallel

this one came from nick at dime boxes.  i did not know that these true blue parallels existed, but they fall right in line for dodger collectors such as myself.  they are not numbered, but are marked as "1 of 500" on the back.

nick sent some other colorful and chromy stuff:

2002 topps chrome dodgers team refractor

the 2002 topps chrome refractors are very nice. this one will go in my dodger stadium binder. it has a nice shot of the right field corner there behind the team with the stadium club restaurant in the upper right part of the card.

2005 topps chrome hee-seop choi red refractor

this is the first red refractor i've seen from 2005 topps chrome. it's cool and numbered to 25.  the thick borders of 2005 chrome lend themselves nicely to color parallels, but alas, there were no blue parallels that year.

i mentioned that the saito card at the top of the post was a-number 1 on my list of most wanted cards.  nick also knocked a card off of that same list with this 2018 topps big league corey seager card

 

and i picked up another in this 1997 fleer ultra darren dreifort card

little d looks strong! i appreciate the no batting gloves look, too.

so, with the 2007 blue refractor team set now complete, what's next?  well, i had already noted that i was going to target 2003 topps chrome in 2019, and i've finished the base set.  now, my primary team set focus will be on the 2003 topps chrome refractors, which just happen to come in blue, as dave roberts can attest:

hideo nomo's card in the set has been added to the most wanted list, but i also need a few more:

19 hideo nomo
91 adrian beltre
202 franklin gutierrez fy rc

and that doesn't include the chrome traded refractors:

t7 todd hundley
t73 rickey henderson
t99 fred mcgriff
t125 chin-feng chen
t162 james loney oros
t187 thomari story-harden fy rc
t205 eric riggs
t242 shane victorino fy rc

can you help a blogger out? this may take another 4 years...