Night Owl Cards

  One of the most frustrating things to me is that no matter how much you prepare, research, take advice, it feels like there's no moving forward for very long. It's one step ahead and two steps back.   Maybe this is the point I'm at, actually moving out of middle age, or maybe it's just a period of time that will go away, but I'm dealing with more than a couple firsts in my life that aren't very pleasant.  This is why the hobby means so much to me. There are fun firsts popping off all the time. Every new arrival is a first. I just added the 1969 Topps Gil Hodges and Joe Pepitone to my collection. Welcome newbies! (Actually, this isn't the first time Hodges has been in my collection, I foolishly got rid of my original copy -- don't remember how).   So that's a fun first and I'm eager to recall other fun -- or semi-fun -- firsts to take the edge off of these present-time dumb ol' firsts. So here's the sixth edition of Firsts, where I rand...

  I expect my card purchasing to heat up in the weeks to come. I'm starting to see the budget loosening just a little. Also, the new cards of the season are expected to debut starting next week and then more new sets will show up over the next month or so. I made my first Sportlots purchase of the year just the other day, so that will be the first significant addition to my collection for 2023 (but even there I had to remove some cards from my cart to get it under the budget line). But even though I haven't had a lot of new stuff to show since the first of the year that doesn't mean I'm not collecting furiously under the surface. There is a lot going on behind the scenes that you don't see here.   These are a couple of cards I added to the 2022 insert/parallel portion of my collection through KellysKards1768 on Twitter. He's always raising money for some worthy cause. I could only afford to send $2.25 this time around, but that grabbed me two Dodgers and a coup...

I've been picking off 1977 Kellogg's cards fairly easily and quickly the last few weeks. Unless I hit some sort of short-printed snag that I don't know about, I should have the set finished in a couple of months. That kind of timeline is fairly standard in our access-friendly world. In fact, there are a few people reading this right now who wonder why I didn't just buy the whole thing at once. This is how spoiled we've become. Twenty-five years ago how could I have accomplished this? Where could I have found 1977 Kellogg's cards -- 20-year-old oddballs -- for sale? I couldn't even tell you, probably because I wasn't collecting then. But even so, it couldn't have been as easy as it is now. I know when I was pulling Kellogg's cards out of the cereal box back in the '70s, the only way you could obtain the entire set is to order them off the side of the box. It was either that or buy a mountain of cereal and hope you don't pull out a...

(Today marks exactly one month of working from home. I have no idea why I couldn't have started doing this 10 years earlier. Time for Cardboard Appreciation. This is the 292nd in a series): Meet my first association with Ron Santo. This is how I came to know him. Mini-sized. The most diamond-cut of all diamond-cuts. And a member of the Chicago White Sox. That's what I knew of this Santo fellow. He played for the Chicago White Sox. And he appeared on strange-looking cards. I pulled this card out of a pack in 1975, having no idea that he spent the vast majority of his major league career with the White Sox's city rival, the Cubs. Eventually, probably many years later, I re-associated Santo with the Cubs. However, when his name pops in my head -- and that happens very rarely -- he is a member of the White Sox. On a crooked card. You just can't destroy the power of first associations. You can force it down, way in the subconscious. But you can never kill it. ...

The latest incarnation of the Topps Archives set is due to hit shelves this week. For months I was uncertain of what designs Archives would use in 2019 or even when it would be released. That's because those announcements came in April, a whirlwind month of Very Grown-Up Problems for me and I totally missed the news. It takes a lot to get information about a new 1975 tribute past me but it did, all the way into mid-August. But now we're here and I'm caught up, and I have some decisions to make. The first one is whether I will attempt to complete all of the cards in Archives that are devoted to the '75 design, much as I did with the set three years ago when it chose 1979. Once again, I have zero interest in the other two designs -- 1958 never impressed me much and 1993? Come on. I'm undecided on whether I will attempt another partial completion. Mostly it's because I know Archives will never get the tribute to the '75 design exactly right (I s...