Night Owl Cards

  Starting a Blog Bat-Around these days is kind of like announcing in 1989 that you just bought a vinyl record. Nobody cares, everyone's moved on to compact discs/TikTok.   But records came back, and are dumb expensive, so maybe blogging will, too. Anyway, this is a Blog Bat-Around for the seven of you that blog and care about this topic.   Not Another Baseball Card Blog has already kicked it off . This theme came from a Bluesky discussion and was specifically mentioned by Shlabotnik Report , I think. What are cards you like that feature a team you don't like?   This could get very involved for me. There are a lot of cards I like, often showing teams I root against. And my dislike for teams can spread like a disease covering two-thirds of major league franchises. It all depends on the baseball scene at the time, whether playoffs are involved, etc.   But to keep this manageable, I'll cover four or five teams. And most of the cards I'm showing are coming from ch...

  On a post a couple weeks ago, cards as I see them showed off his signed autographed cards from the 1978 Topps set. He has a whole bunch -- more than 500 of them -- which is terribly impressive.   That inspired me to see how many autographs I own from the 1975 Topps set, as like gcrl's 1978 Topps set, it is the one that kicked off my collecting journey.   I knew that it would be far, far less than 500. My collection pursuit has never been about autographs. It's been a side-dabbling at best, mostly restricted to my early blog days. But I figured that if there was one set that would yield the most autographed cards, it would be 1975.   Maybe I'd have 10 cards from 1975 signed, I guessed. Maybe a little less than that. Eight? Seven?   Try five.   Ooof.   But they're all impressive in their own right. That Bill Buckner doubles as an entry in my '75 buyback collection.   So, yeah, word scribbles aren't exactly my thing. But which set does have the mo...

    I don't think I need to tell you that I love lists. Half of my blog, probably, is some sort of list. I love making lists. I like compiling those lists into a series (a list of a list). I like organizing my cards according to lists.   I've been doing that since I was a relative tyke, sitting on the bedroom floor, laying out 10 cards (five on each row) in order of career batting order on the back, selecting the next card off the stack to my left, and then shifting the lined-up cards over one according to the new arrival's stats.   Lists are an easy way to make information digestible and entertaining. Creating lists enjoyed a big boost in popularity in the early 1980s, as there seemed to be new books every week about this list or that. Lists fell into overkill, especially since the advent of the internet and a whole bunch of fly-by-night websites that want clicks. But a well-maintained, thoughtful list is always interesting to me. I gravitate toward lists: Top sitco...

    Although I recently lamented the former card bloggers who have disappeared from the virtual card world -- couldn't tell you what they're doing or even if they're alive -- there are still plenty of former bloggers that I see on other social media sites. That's one of the reasons I have not been solely a blogger since the rise of other social media forms.   While blogging is easily my preferred platform for cards, communicating with old blogging friends in more informal ways, whether Twitter or Blue Sky or wherever, is a bit easier, casual-like and a little more fun (sometimes). It's random card thoughts and and conversations in easy bites. Another plus -- trades spring out of nowhere. You start the day with no intention of exchanging cards and 20 minutes later I'm swapping cards.   Recently I sent a few current Tigers cards to ex-blogger/ex-twitterer Boobie Maine , who now is in the card (and music) conversation on Blue Sky. I know too many Tigers fans lately...

    I was thinking about writing this post within the next month or so, ideally around when I found the first cards of the season. But it's going to be far too busy then and I'm not good at planning posts in advance, so you're reading it now. This year marks the 50th anniversary of me in the hobby, buying baseball cards. In the spring and summer of 1975 I made periodic trips to whatever nearby store sold cards and greedily purchased them. The instances were relatively rare -- I wasn't going to the store every week. I had a meager allowance and had to save up in order to buy a few packs. The occasions were so seldom, I can sort of remember all of them: 1. Walking to a drug store several blocks away in Binghamton, N.Y. (this happened maybe three separate times) 2. Walking to a corner store -- we didn't know the name of it, we called it "the green store". This is where my 1975 mini cards came from, in cello packs, the kind you see above. It was closer than th...