+ Added a new
Baseball Card set to the Cards section.
2024 Topps Archives includes 300 cards for the 2023 season's best stars and rookies as well as many historical superstars/HOFers.
Babe Ruth and
Ted Williams are included, among others. Card designs are from historical Topps Baseball Card sets from 1961,1970 and 1994. In this way, Archives is similar to Heritage and can be confusing since there can be overlap. Heritage does not include historical players and sticks to 1 year to replicate. Seeing current players with old Topps designs always gives me a thrill and transports me to different periods of my life.
+ Thanks to our first new subscriber of 2026. "TN" has subscribed to
TBC PREMIUM. Only $24/year! The 2nd subcriber was "HP"! Thanks to both of you for getting TBC off to a great start in '26!
If you're a frequent visitor to the site, I strongly recommend subscribing to
TBC PREMIUM. Of COURSE I want more subscribers...but truthfully, I use the site for my own baseball research and the difference between using PREMIUM vs the free version of the site is worth the small investment. The site is faster, smoother and has more functionality. Even if you don't care about the
Tracker or the
Research Applications. Its a dopamine-inducing experience!
> Happy New Year fellow Baseball Fans! Any resolutions? Me? Nope. Never. I don't believe in them other than the surge of dopamine that come from making them. The feeling that YES, I have acknowledged what is hurting me and I have now made plans to make that change. But I will ONLY make that change when an arbitrary date appears. I will defer it and make today more palatable as a result. I'll start after I have recovered from the final binge and the New Year's partying. Maybe on the 6th? That FEELING of acknowldgement is important as is the PLAN. But to rely fully on
will power is not a good strategy. A strategy of deprivation has never worked for me. Counting calories, depriving myself of sugar or alcohol or caffeine, forcing myself to work out. None of that has ever worked for me because it relies fully on will power and discipline. On a good day without stressors, its possible. But when the stressors hit, and they will, the system will want to soothe through those old habits and your will power will slowly (or quickly) disintegrate. Those habits were there in the first place for a reason. They worked!
> So I spent New Year's at a friend's house. An hour away. We played board games. We had ribs and drank a bit of
wine. But truthfully, I wasn't into it. I was tired. I was spent. The family drama. The bad cold. The external demands. The Site. The Cards. All of it. But I went through the motions. I was a good friend. I was a good husband. We stayed past midnight.
But when we left, we were greeted with a snowstorm. The first
snow of 2026 of course and maybe the 22nd instance of snow since mid-November. To put that in perspective, a couple of years ago, we had a
green Christmas. I was running in my shorts and t-shirt on Christmas Eve. It was ludicrous. Preposterous. Absolutely Amazing. But
winter has come early and often this year. From all directions. And to have to brush off my car at midnight + 30 with a temperature of -13 celsius (9 degrees farenheit) with a an hour-long drive...correction...now an hour and 30 minutes, on uncleared roads with New Year's party-ers going home...it just hit me like a ton of bricks and I mentally shut down. I'll talk about shutdowns in a future post.
I got home at 2:25am. I slept until 10. Next I had to attack a driveway with 3 cars, 1 completely iced over from a prior freezing rain event followed by a trip to visit TBC's parents in their rehab center. Hoping for calmer days ahead!
