Two Ohtanis

A couple of cards from @realwesmoore and @Thorzul boost one of my unofficial player collections. 

 

I started pulling Shohei Ohtani cards like crazy back in 2018, the last year that any and every product on the market was readily available at the retail level. I wasn't quite sure I bought into the hype and clearly remember the eyerolling frenzy over Bowman boxes at the time. Nevertheless, I put away all of those Ohtani cards and didn't think about him much until spring training this year. Suddenly, he was destroying baseballs and mowing people down. I went after him in each of my fantasy leagues, which helped me to an impressive year where I won three out of the four I participated in, only losing the fourth league by a half of a point.

What I never ended up with was one of Ohtani's coveted base cards, because 2018 was year three of me turning my back on the Topps flagship product. When I saw one pop up on Twitter recently, thanks to another Wes Moore "Tradeathon", I went for it. Is it an iconic card? I'm not really sure. Interest in the Topps base rookie card has surely increased lately, but if you can't immediately picture what the card looks like in your head (think... I don't know... Mark McGwire's Olympic card?), will it truly be a significant collectible years down the road? In any case, I'm glad to have it. I started squirreling away the rest of my non-RC Ohtani cards earlier this year when it became clear that he was going to have a historically special season. I don't know that he's ever going to be someone I officially collect, but for now I'll see where this goes.

Death Stare Cards (aka Thorzul) held his 15th (!) annual Trade Me Anything, where he trades off his spare parts from a new box of Topps Update for, well, anything. For at least the second year in a row, there were no cards that really fit my collection, but another Shohei Ohtani card was available. This one also heads to the unofficial collection.

This year's All-Star cards are actually inserts due to some sort of printing deadline issue, but they use the base design and seem to be fairly common so I'm not too mad about it. If any of you have been opening Topps Update boxes and packs, I have the team set squared away but can always use help with the inserts and parallels and such.