Night Owl Cards

    OK, now that I've established myself as an oddball in the current collecting landscape -- preferring vintage cards and all -- it's appropriate that I show off some recent "oddball" arrivals in my collection.   This runs the gamut and covers 85 years of trading cards and some of it isn't even cardboard.   Let's see:   Fired-up by my first acquisition of a 1960 Leaf high-number Dodger card in Rip Repulski, I decided to grab another one with this Joe Pignatano. It has a few minor flaws (it was listed as "good," which is usually "good enough" for me), but it still looks great.   That leaves just Stan Williams to complete the team set. Upon landing the Repulski, I received an email informing me that the Williams was available for a reasonable price on sportlots. But I didn't jump on it (I'm rarely financially ready to pounce on opportunities) and it's not there anymore.     Here's a card -- and an owlie greeting card -- that ...

    As a team collector, I don't really do a great job of acquiring the separate team sets that Topps puts out each year. It's a little difficult to stay focused because the team sets often feature mostly the same cards that are in flagship -- out of around 20 cards, maybe three are different. But mostly it's me forgetting, because I do want the team set each year. Jim, from cards as I see them, does a much better job of remembering and each year he has a post in which he compares the Dodgers in Topps flagship to the Dodgers in the team set. He wrote one this year a couple of weeks ago and I made a mental note to add the team set to my collection. I even took the next step of finding it online and adding it to my cart. Over the following days I'd note that it was still in there and think about cashing out but I still hadn't. Good thing because a week ago a box showed up on my porch unannounced. It contained: The 2024 Dodgers team set AND the 2022 Dodgers team set. ...

You ever play that game in which you calculate how many years it's been since you were a kid and then take that total and subtract it from one of those years when you were a kid and come up with a difference that causes you to instantly turn off all the lights in your house and hide in a dark corner of your room? Yeah, that's not a fun game to play when you start to hit a certain age. It's been more than 40 years since the 1973 Topps set has been issued. Subtract 40 from 1973 and you're in the Great Depression -- in more ways than one. The only time when this exercise is fun is when it comes to cards. I am combining two recent packages that I received because each of them feature 1973 Topps (I can't have every post being '73s, as wonderful as they are). The '73s were central to the package. But with 1973 at the center, each package contained a card from either side of the spectrum -- 40 or so years after 1973 and 40 or so years before 1973. Now th...

That's the first line of a note in the latest fantastic card package from Dave. "A little more of everything," is the best way to sum up the contents. I could easily break this up into six different posts, but what fun is that? No, you need to see this in its totality. Gaze upon the splendor. Marvel at the magnificence. Bathe in the bounty. We're going to cover a little more of everything. I'll start with this: That's a rack pack of 1987 Topps, carefully selected for the Fernando Valenzuela all-star glossy showing in the first panel. See, Dave takes me seriously when I say I want to try to complete 1987 Topps passively. I don't want to intentionally buy a 1987 Topps card. And I certainly don't want to put up a want list. I'd like to see how close I can come to doing this. I'm looking forward to opening this rack pack and seeing how many I need. Random Dodgers, most of which I'm sure fill holes (we'll see later). Yes...