closing out the annual collections with favorites and more

no point in burying the lede - you had better bet i was excited to see this card

show up as part of the 2023 topps heritage high numbers release!  more on that beauty later...

every year i get excited to see new baseball cards. while i am still a team collector (with less fervor than in years past) and a player collector (is it possible that i am starting to think maybe there are too many steve garvey cards these days?), i have a lot of other collecting interests that makes seeing a wide variety of cards something that i enjoy.

when 2023 topps heritage first came out, i saw this byron buxton card

and was enthralled. spoiler alert - buxton was poised to replace fernando tatis jr as my favorite non-dodger, and this shot of him at the plate in target field had me setting the card aside as a potential representative for my 2023 entry to the favorite non-dodger of the year mini-collection. as it turned out, this card made it only so far as my "names and numbers on the back" mini-collection.

let's move on with the annual collection categories, shall we?

topps flagship representation - aaron judge

each year, i select a card to represent topps flagship. usually the selection is reactionary to the previous season, and that is certainly the case with the judge card here. 

topps flagship #350 collection - alex bregman

here's the back with the number 350 shown

this mini-collection was begat from steve garvey's 1978 topps card holding that number on the checklist, so i decided to track down all of the flagship 350s from 1957 on. this is the second year in a row that an astro has held 350.

favorite dodger - clayton kershaw

i chose kershaw's 2023 topps all aces insert to represent him in this mini-collection. it's the ninth year in a row that kershaw has held the title of my favorite dodger, and it may be the last. his return is up in the air, and wouldn't happen until the summer of 2024 according to reports (if it happens at all). my guess is there will be a new player in this spot next year, unless kershaw confirms his return early in the new year.

favorite non-dodger - byron buxton

as mentioned up above, i replaced tatis with buxton for 2023, and i picked up his 2023 topps chrome lids mitchell & ness card for this collection. i found that i just wasn't keeping up with tatis like i did earlier in his career, prior to his suspension. and, with the balanced schedule, the dodgers weren't playing the padres 18 times or whatever, so i had less exposure to him that way. as for buxton, he was hurt a lot but i can't say that i paid attention to anyone else to any great degree.

i considered adley rutschman at some point during the season. he was the catcher on my fantasy team so i was following him pretty closely. i've got his 2023 topps allen & ginter card

and a 2023 topps chrome future stars insert

standing by but in the end i stuck with buxton. next year, i may be ready to fully turn my attention to royce lewis. we will see.

as for my favorite cards of the year, it's a davey lopes celebration in 2023.

favorite non-dodger card - topps heritage hank aaron baseball flashbacks

huge props to topps for using a different photo of hank aaron's 715th home run - one that included lopes (and the black armband for ken mcmullen's wife). i can't think of another non-dodger card that i coveted nearly as much as this one over the past 12 months.

favorite dodger card - topps heritage high numbers davey lopes 1974 highlights

even though the card clearly shows lopes in 1980, seeing him on the highlights checklist made this selection a no-brainer. there weren't a lot of stellar dodger cards this year, to be honest, but even if there were some, they would have fallen to lopes.

in fact, up until the heritage high numbers cards were released, the card i was slotting in here was don sutton's panini donruss card

it's ok for a logoless card, and it shows old man sutton with his perm rather than his straight hair look from earlier in his career. plus, the number on the front of his jersey is red, not blue. panini definitely fixed some of my issues with other sutton cards of late, and i went and picked up a bunch of parallels of this card as a result, including the color holos (here are four i have not shown before)

and emoji/pattern parallels, like the "america" numbered to 50

and "presidents" numbered to 46

and the "independence day" which isn't numbered at all

it's the kind of nonsense i hope to avoid in 2024. no promises, though.

one last card that i will show, and it is one that i really like a lot. it's clayton kershaw's 2023 topps chrome lids mitchell & ness card

kershaw on the 2008 topps design is always a good idea, and the chrome treatment makes it that much better. once i saw this card, i realized that the sutton card couldn't really be my favorite dodger card of the year, but i didn't necessarily think that the lids kershaw was it, either. thankfully, davey lopes came to the rescue!