Night Owl Cards

  My Father's Day was nice and all too brief.   Staying home was imperative. Anywhere I would want to go on this day would require a drive and we definitely are not doing that on Father's Day. So, the day consisted mostly of watching baseball -- A's/Royals, Cardinals/Brewers, then Giants/Dodgers. Yay, a victory! Beat back those BusterPoseys!    I also talked on the phone with my daughter (a big deal for any Gen Zer), which was the obvious day highlight. I ate pizza and chicken wings, my requested dinner, which thrilled my wife who didn't have to cook. And I opened some baseball cards. The 2025 Heritage blaster and the gift card were Father's Day presents. I haven't decided how to handle the gift card yet. (It will not be used on any Series 2, the amount dupes I've seen pulled from a single retail box is offensive even before getting to the price hike).   The Heritage box went pretty well considering I'm getting down to the "Handful of Base Cards Plu...

This is the kind of post that's best reserved for a much more succinct manner of social media. In fact, that's where I saw this little nugget of information that I never knew before. I never knew it despite collecting the 1974 Topps set and completing it, despite doing so years and years ago, and despite viewing this Tom Walker card a couple dozen times at least. Willie Mays is on the card, too, you guys. You can spot his "24" as he waits his turn in the cage, as a member of the New York Mets there at Shea Stadium. Fantastic. I learned this from none other than the SplitSeason1981 account over on Blue Sky. He's the former mayor of Cooperstown, and a card collector. I traded with him several years ago. He mentioned the neat Mays fact today and I was dumbfounded. It's amazing what you can learn even after 50 years of hoarding trading cards. That's all I have for you today. It's been a hectic week but I'm glad I picked up at least some cardboard know...

  I did my usual blog post ritual Tuesday, writing it up in the early afternoon and then setting a publish time for a few hours in the future.   The post did publish and it appeared on everyone's blog rolls, but it didn't show up on the blogger dashboard/reading list. That's happened periodically over the years and eventually it does show up. I waited and waited and it still didn't. It's on the reading list now if you go back a day or so on the dashboard, but I have a feeling some readers missed it.   So let's see what happens with this one. There's a weird synchronicity going on with the 1974 Topps set right now. Maybe that's not the right description but that's what I'm calling it.   For starters, it's the 50th anniversary of the first set I ever saw, the first cards I ever owned. I've written about that lots and have mentioned that it's the anniversary of my first baseball cards several times this year. One of the more recent ones...

  Well, that upgrade post from a couple of weeks ago gained some traction! Thanks to that post and the generosity of reader Paul, I've been able to make some progress on an upgrade project that's been in the back of my head ever since I returned to collecting. I've mentioned before that my collecting return was sparked by a couple of instances: 1) Finding Topps' All-Time Fan Favorites cards from 2004 in the toy department of a K-Mart in Buffalo; and 2) Building the 1975 Topps set from a pawn shop downtown. I'd go to the pawn shop (it's long gone, by the way) on my lunch break or in the afternoon on a day off and leaf through the one dealer's card offerings. He had almost the entire set of '75s in boxes on one glass display counter, and behind me was another couple of boxes of vintage cards, mostly stuff from the '60s or early '70s, on another counter. And in the glass display were all kinds of cards I couldn't afford then (but probably coul...

  These are bizarre words for me to write but this year marks 50 years since I first held baseball cards in my hand. Those cards were 1974 Topps baseball cards. Had Heritage not been so scared to begin with Topps' first real baseball set when it kicked off the brand in 2001, we'd be celebrating my 50 years with the '74 design in Heritage. Full circle! But Heritage has been out of kilter ever since and I need to take a time-out every time I try to figure out which set Heritage will be replicating in the 2030s when it should take milliseconds. Heritage did the '74 thing last year and the design means so much to me that I completed the whole thing despite last year ending in a "3". It's such a classic set that I started with 50 years ago -- even though I chucked those cards at the end of the summer. I used the Eddie Leon card as a post-topper once before, quite awhile ago (I like that post , most of what I wrote in there still applies). It's one of those ...

  Today is Father's Day, which as I've mentioned before means doing what I want to do, and only that, all day.   For some that may mean boating, fishing, golfing, going to a ballgame, some of the typical stuff. For me, and most Father's Days now, it means nerding out over baseball cards. As pathetic as that may seem to some people -- probably most people -- I'm perfectly happy doing this. What? You want me to go to Dave & Busters? Come on. So I've got something here that will interest a very limited amount of people. Heck probably most readers and bloggers don't care. But that doesn't matter today on the day of doing what I want. I've long been interested in the phenomenon of players disappearing from card sets. They're in a card set year after year and suddenly they vanish, and then they appear again!   This happens a lot, but you need to pay attention year after year. A very specific example of this is when a player does not come to an agreeme...

  I'm pretty certain that I will be declaring this year's Heritage set the set of the year. Not that I think that it is perfectly executed or anything -- we still don't see eye-to-eye on a lot of stuff -- but I know I've become a little obsessed. I was in Walmart at 10:30 last night for the first time since -- *checks calendar* -- February 2020 and grabbed one of three blasters of Heritage remaining, fully realizing I said in the last Heritage post I wouldn't get any more blasters for fear of dinged corners.   I'm having too much fun. Just look at the card at the top of the post. I love that card. It's as '74 as it could possibly be with a player wearing a softball jersey.   I dug up a few more individual player card tributes. I'm sticking to just players who share card numbers, I don't want anyone getting bent out of shape 😒.   Adam Wainwright and Reggie Cleveland both land on card No. 175. A lot more fans in the stands in Wainwright's pic...