Yes, more charting. I’m going to say this is the April thing to do and be fine with it.
As much as I gripe about how you can’t even get a Shohei Ohtani base card without shelling out a buck fifty, I’m still adding cards of my new favorite player at a decent clip. Topps produces so many cards of him that I can’t help it. And every time I check which players rank the highest in my collection in terms of number of cards, Ohtani is climbing the charts probably faster than anyone.
Uh, I guess there’s not a base card in there, huh? But that foursome is pretty snazzy. The 2026 flagship card with the leaf pattern arrived in a separate envelope as Jeremy said he forgot to include it. He also added that I hope I like it. I do I do.
The green parallel Heritage card is appreciated, too, despite my not enjoying the parallels with Heritage this year (it’s just too much). I think I’ll like the color parallels a little more like last year’s set when Heritage explores the 1978 and 1979 designs, with the thinner white borders. It’ll be interesting to see what happens when Heritage takes on 1981 Topps — probably something weird like when it did 1975 Topps.
Oops, that was a tangent. I planned on this being about Ohtani. … SO once I got these cards from Jeremy I checked where Ohtani was on my TCDB list again.
There he is at No. 53 — hey, that’s his current consecutive on-base streak number! Does getting an Ohtani card for each additional day the streak continues sound like a good idea? I do need to get him far past pretenders like Julio Urias and Gavin Lux.
Anyway, it didn’t take long for Ohtani to approach the top 50 once he became a Dodger. I expect by the end of the year he’ll be in the top 40, which is only about 20 cards away. (I could get there faster if base cards weren’t almost 2 bucks).
The rest of the cards that Jeremy sent — the ones that I needed — were other current Dodgers:
OK, Kershaw isn’t current anymore. But he still feels like it.
More. This foursome features someone who is homer happy, an improved fielder, a guy who should not be in the starting rotation and Mookie who needs to come back and fill my day with sunshine again.
Still more. Venturing into Panini territory. Yamamoto thought he was wild and bold until he was placed with these three other cards.
I’ll end it with the original Dodgers Japanese import on an A&G mini (with Josue De Paula there for comparison only). This is only my second A&G Dodger mini for 2025, what happened to me and A&G?
So that was a nice boost to my Ohtani collection, which I will continue to build for as long as he’s a Dodger. I hope that Ohtani prices come down just a little in the months ahead, just so I’m not constantly reminded of how little I sold those Ohtani rookie cards a few years ago — back when collectors were sane.