Night Owl Cards

   In early May, I realized that it had been a long time since I had even looked at the baseballcardstore website .   In the past five years I've made purchased from there two or three times a year. It's a great place to find cheap cards and there's been the bonus of Steven sending cards my way just because or producing made-to-order Dodgers packages for me to grab at my convenience.   But as the site grew more popular I found less and less of interest. All the good stuff seemed to be snapped up right away. And there was another Dodgers super-collector who had discovered the site who was grabbing anything I wanted. Eventually I just stopped checking it out.   When I realized that it had been a year since I had placed an order I resolved to find stuff that fit my collecting interests. If I really tried, it shouldn't be that difficult. I like a lot of stuff. And the cards are cheap, so make an effort, night owl!   It took awhile -- so little time to devote an...

  You're going to have to wait a little for the vintage on this post, and it's just one card. But I think it's a decent one. So, yeah, that's my tease. First with the modern junk ... er ... stuff.   Kevin from The Diamond King sent me an unexpected envelope a week or so ago. It might have been payback for the 5,000-post giveaway envelope I sent, or maybe I actually requested some of these cards and don't remember. When I'm uncertain, I always land on the side of my feeble memory.   All of the cards, except for one, are modern Dodgers items, like the Koufax Archives card above, and a few are pretty snazzy, too.   For example this from last year's Donruss. I didn't know such a thing existed. It's certainly different for Panini, as the card company is not in the habit of showing actual baseball scenes behind the players.   I admit though I half expected Mookie to move in some sort of lenticular fashion, so that was a small disappointment. Also, this is...

  I'm sure this happens to everyone, but when I'm shopping for other people, most of the time I'm also shopping for myself.   During the Christmas season, especially if I'm in a store that sells cards, I'll swing by the card aisle if there is any cash left after shopping for the significants.   And when I'm looking for cards online for someone, I find myself throwing a few things for myself in the cart, too.   Sometimes when you're shopping for someone else, you end up with a card just because! I think that's what happened with the Devin Mann Bowman Platinum autograph card up top. It arrived from The Diamond King .   I had snagged a couple of cards from his most recent Flash Freebie (it pays to look at people's vacation photos, you guys) to distribute in my 5,000-post giveaway and -- what's this? -- it's my second Devin Mann autograph card! (Devin Mann is in his second year of Double A in Tulsa, but I'll ignore that now).   These were all...

  I've had a little bit more luck with finding vintage cards for my collection since moaning and groaning earlier .   It's nothing to write home about (but I will write about it), and it's mostly a product of actively pursuing it rather than my nasty habit of hoping the vintage comes to me, But it's an improvement. One of the reasons I desire vintage cards so much, other than that they are the way God intended cards to be, is that I have so few of them in my collection relatively speaking. Every time I realize I have more Donruss cards than I do cards made before 1971 I want to punt half my collection into the street and start over. I have so few of them that if there's a vintage card in my collection, I've probably written about it on this blog. Yup, every one. I get so excited when I get one I have to announce it to the world. So the challenge here is to find five vintage cards in my collection that I've never written about ... I think. I probably have. He...

(Greetings on "Red Planet Day," which commemorates the day when Mariner 4 was launched in 1964 to become the first spacecraft to fly past Mars. This seems like the perfect day for me to order my very first "Mars Attacks" card -- although I see they aren't cheap. My nonsports collection is quite paltry when it comes to the '60s. For more on '60s cards, read on for Cardboard Appreciation. This is the 309th in a series): As someone who has collected for decades now, I find myself re-evaluating my opinion of specific sets. I am a set-collector first, so the look of a set, rather than who is in the checklist, is most important to me. And because of that, I have my favorites and my non-favorites and you've seen all of my opinions on that through ranking series and all kinds of other posts. I gots my opinions, don't I? For sets that came out during my first years of collecting and all the way through my early 20s, there is no chance I will change my opi...