Greetings everyone!

As the newest contributing member of dodgerfan.net, I thought I’d start out with how I became a Dodger fan…

Like many kids, my first introduction to Dodger baseball came courtesy of the sweet, soothing voice of Vin Scully…listening to him both on TV and radio was definitely the highlight of my early years (sorry to all my grade school teachers)…

My love for baseball expanded into collecting baseball cards…the first cards I ever purchased were from the 1985 Topps set…I remember those days of opening up wax packs, sticking the gum in my mouth and sorting out the cards…naturally, I set aside my Dodger cards for safe keeping…

Through the late 80’s, my dad and I bought cards whenever we had a chance…I would venture down to the local card shop (The Sports Alley – today, it’s a video arcade) and buy packs while my dad bought boxes from the Price Club (now Costco)…to this day, I am STILL sorting through all those cards from the 80’s!

In 1988, I got involved in this thing called Rotisserie Baseball (today, we know it as Fantasy Baseball)…there was a group of us in high school who got together, drafted our teams and kept track of the stats…I remember I was the “lucky” guy who looked up all the stats in the Sunday edition of the USA Today and put them in a spreadsheet and calculated the standings – each week…amazingly enough, I found that to be fun and to this day, I still love looking at stats…

During the 90’s, this thing called college and getting a real job took most of my time and baseball card collecting took a back seat to everything else…so much so that my collection was gathering dust in my room at my mom and dad’s house…

…but my love for Dodger baseball never went away…

I attended many games during the 90’s and remember vividly when a young catcher named Mike Piazza blasted a line drive double to right center…the ball was hit so hard that I knew this kid had a future…what I didn’t realize was that I was witnessing the beginning of a Hall of Fame career…

About 9 months ago, it was necessary for me to move my collection to my current home (thankfully, my wife understands how much my collection means to me, so I’m able to make a mess of our front bedroom – known now as “the card room”)…with my renewed interest in the hobby, I have gotten back into buying and trading cards…

One of my recent transactions involved trading some very valuable hockey cards to a gentleman in Missouri…sure, I followed hockey back in the 80’s and early 90’s when Wayne Gretzky was in LA and Bernie Nicholls belonged to our local country club, but these were cards that I was able to trade for some GREAT Dodger cards…anytime you can get great Dodger cards, you should make the trade, right???

Added to my collection were two big ones of note – a 1957 Topps Dodgers Sluggers card which features Carl Furillo, Gil Hodges, Roy Campanella and Duke Snider…the other was a 1963 Topps Dodgers Big Three card which features Johnny Podres, Don Drysdale and Sandy Koufax…

The beauty of collecting cards, especially those of players before my time, is the fact that I can feel the history behind the players just by looking at their cards…sometime down the road, I’ll write more about some of my favorite Dodger cards and I hope I can continue making more trades to expand my Dodger collection…

…boy, I feel like a kid again…

Anyway, that’s my story…I wanted to thank Chris and Alex for inviting me to be a member of dodgerfan.net…I’m looking forward to sharing my love for Dodger baseball with all of you!

Ryan