five more reasons i'm glad i'm not a yankee fan

my first memory of the major leagues is the 1977 world series - specifically game 6. i remember reggie jackson hitting three home runs and i remember lee lacy making the last out. i remember the disappointment i felt, as my dodger fandom was already entrenched. however, i think i could have been excused had i decided to follow and root for the bronx bombers instead.  after all, they were winners and a couple of my neighborhood friends were yankee fans. 

i stuck with dodger blue, and that fandom extended to baseball card collecting once i expanded from set collecting and added team collecting to my hobby pursuit around 1980. once the late 1980's rolled around, i stopped putting together most sets (i even stopped with topps flagship for a few years) but i never stopped assembling team sets (or trying to). as the number of sets exploded in the hobby, this task became more difficult and i sort of picked and chose which sets to focus on.

in 2001 i was especially excited for the inaugural release of topps heritage. i pre-ordered a box that never came, but still went after the dodger team set in addition to the complete 407 card set. the dodger team set was easy - i completed that fairly quickly - but here i am still working on the full set 20+ years later. one of the reasons that the dodger team set was easy is that all of the cards are included in the non-variant/non-short print part of the set.

the first 80 cards of the set are not short printed per se, but come in two variations - red back and black back. i think there is a presumption that they are short printed, because the prices are generally higher even today for those cards than cards 81-310. cards 311-407 are truly short printed, and prices reflect that reality. even though i make no distinction between red and black backs for my set, i was still missing over half of those first 80 cards as of a few months ago. since then, i've been chipping away at my want list, and recently added five of those cards to my set:

those are cards number 11 (jeter), 6 (o'neill), 8 (mendoza), 15 (cone), and 57 (pettitte). there are other yankees in the first 80 cards - chuck knoblauch (10), jorge posada (24), mariano rivera (39), tino martinez (45), roger clemens (48), orlando hernandez (51) - and i still need tino, clemens, and el duque. i just can't imagine being a yankee team collector and trying to complete the team set back in 2001 when this set came out. i spent $3.99 on the jeter which even today i think is a good deal. at least there aren't any truly short printed yankees as far as i can tell.

so, yeah. i am glad to be a dodger fan, especially when it comes to that set. side note - we likely have not seen the last of the 1952 topps design (or any other topps designs) with the news that fanatics has acquired topps' sports card division. hopefully fanatics will continue heritage or at least know what to do with the 1978 design. 

meanwhile, in that same order i completed my 2000 fleer ultra gold medallion edition team set by picking up one of my most wanted cards:

eric gagne! game (and team set) over!

i also found what had proven to be a rather elusive card for my dodger stadium collection:

that's a 2011 topps attax card, of which there is also a foil version that i haven't tracked down a single copy of, let alone two. luckily for me, dodger stadium shows up on cardboard way less frequently than yankee stadium.