Night Owl Cards

I may be an adult who collects trading cards but I don't like my trading cards to remind me I'm an adult.   Here's how:   Most of the cards I value, almost all my favorite sets and all my favorite players, come from three decades -- the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. These are the cards that produce the greatest memories when I look through them in my collection.   But looking for memories after that gets a little dangerous. The 1990s is full of adult concerns, worries and incidents ... and all that angry music. I can say the same for the 2000s, 2010s and 2020s. Best just look at the cards and be done with it, don't start dredging up memories, you're not gonna like it.   So when I looked for cards that interested me in the latest Diamond Jesters' Time Travel Trading post, I instinctively picked cards from the '60s, '70s and '80s. I didn't even realize I was doing it. They were just naturally the ones that appealed to me.   '60s     First up, a 1961...

  Ever since the local monthly show (and many other shows throughout the country) has become overrun with TCG cards I've debated skipping or at least not automatically attending every month. It's become less and less productive over the past 9 months to a year.   But like they say in the majors, "that's why you play the game." I was pretty surprised when I walked into the usual hall Saturday.   First, it was packed. I normally attend closer to 1 p.m. when typically the crowd has thinned out. But I could tell driving into the parking lot that there were still many people there. Second, the show was overwhelmingly sports cards. Any Pokemon, Magic, etc. seemed limited to a handful of tables. I don't know what caused the sudden shift back to sports cards but I was glad I got up off my recliner.   The change affected my mood more than my shopping. The tables were still overrun with graded football and basketball and I'm sure I heard "PSA" uttered 25-5...

   One thing that has become very clear to me over the last year is that my way of collecting cards -- the way that was the established primary way of collecting for as long as I've been alive -- is being phased out.   There are a variety of reasons -- and forces at work -- for this. I am reminded of one of them every time I attend the monthly card show.   In the past year, the show has moved from primarily sports cards to primarily RPG/TCG cards. I have less than zero interest in these. When I paid my entrance fee at the table, the guy there asked if I wanted to enter the raffle and gestured toward a gift basket filled with TCG stuff -- don't ask me what it was, I couldn't tell you. I gave the guy a flat "no" that sounded like "of course not."   But I'd say more than half of the tables was Pokemon, Magic and whatever else there is in that fantasy realm. Just about the rest was graded football and basketball of mostly modern cards. But I've writt...

    I've written about this card a few times on this blog. It's the first autographed card I ever bought, at one of the first card shows I ever attended back when I was a teenager.   It was a pretty savvy move at the time, though I was not thinking of getting a deal or anything like that. Still the value of Koufax cards and Koufax autographs have shot up in the decades since. I'm very happy I have it.   But my main focus as a collector has not been autographs, it's completing sets and completing Dodgers team sets. Because of that, this Koufax card has always stood in the way. Since it's autographed, I never considered it part of the 1961 Topps Dodgers team set, though I list the set complete on checklists, like on TCDB.   While attending the monthly show in town over the last few months, I've noticed that the one dealer I go to all the time had a 1961 Koufax under glass. Just your regular, "ordinary" '61 Koufax, no signature scrawling on it.   I...

  October is one of the busiest months on the calendar. But unlike some of those other always-busy-months (*cough* "March"), October features fun busy stuff that interests me.   Last night, for example, both of my teams were playing: The Bills (yuck) and the Dodgers (yay!). It was a lot, and I saw almost none of it because I was working. Probably for the best. But then I got home and I wanted to see the Dodgers highlights and that "fly out into a double play" that everyone was discussing online. I waited and waited. It got to be 2 a.m. and still no youtube highlights. I went to bed. Fifteen minutes later the highlights were up.   It's just a lot this month and it's been that way for quite awhile. I do miss the younger days when I didn't have as much on my schedule -- or at least that's the way I remember it. I miss many of the elements of those days, which is why I want cards from back then.   Diamond Jesters' Time Travel Trading is a great way ...

  Wow, not off to the greatest start for Year 18 with this blog. Posting is likely to be a bit sporadic the next couple weeks. Nothing unfortunate, just one of those life whirlwinds where a bunch of disconnected things come together to conspire against my hobby.   Just as this busy period got started, I was getting my lunch on Saturday when my wife dropped the mail on the counter. The October/November Beckett Vintage Collector jumped right out to me. "Here already?" I said.   I turned the pages and there was the second article I wrote for them this past spring.     I did not expect to see this issue until early October. That was about the time the August-September issue arrived (early August) and -- wham -- a month later I'm discussing my latest article. I'm not used to the magazine world moving so fast! Isn't this "old media"?   The cover teases to my story this time, always a little thrill in itself.   And speaking of thrills, yes, this article was i...

  I've talked about my history of collecting football cards here and there. Most of my childhood football-collecting involved the 1977 and 1979 Topps football sets. I also saw some 1975 and 1976 football a little bit but I didn't collect any. When the 1980s hit, I ignored football cards completely. But I still watched it all through the decade. I remember Jaworski and Plunkett, the 1982 shortened season, the Ickey Shuffle; the Redskins teams and the Smurfs, Marcus Allen, the USFL, Marino-Duper-Clayton, The Fridge, Dit-ka, Kelly landing in Buffalo, the Eric Dickerson trade, the Broncos and the lopsided Super Bowls, and 49ers-Bengals Part II. I was there for it all. But football cards? I couldn't have told you most of the designs 15 years ago.   I've slowly caught up and there are a few '80s Topps football designs that I've long admired -- not enough to try to collect any of the sets, but enough to be attracted when the cards are essentially free. During the most ...