Night Owl Cards

  So as mentioned in the  last post , it had been a year since Angus and I had gone to a card show together. We're both busy guys with super-hectic jobs and other issues that rudely won't get out of the way for leisurely pursuits.   He had been saving up some collectibles for me all the while. When we met at the Buffalo Wild Wings parking lot, he unloaded what I'm sure had been taking up too much space for too long.   There was a variety of stuff and all the card items were full of variety, too. Let's start with a legends set that I've always enjoyed.   This is a decent stack of 2001 Fleer Greats of the Game. I own all the Dodgers in this set already, but the purpose of this was to get me started on another set chase I believe.   I do like my legends -- and I now have more than half of the set. It'll go on the back-burner, but someday I may be up to pursuing it. Here's another legends set -- 1994 Ted Williams. The base set is complete. But there are some ni...

  Yesterday was Ron Cey's 73rd birthday and, don't you worry, I took care of acknowledging it. It didn't show up on the blog but it did appear on Twitter. That isn't even all of autographs in the collection. You can fit only so much in the frame. But the rate of me accumulating Cey cards, autographed or otherwise, has slowed dramatically. There haven't been many new Cey cards recently (Topps has mostly ditched its retro-appreciation of '70s/'80s players for, ugh, steroid-era '90s players). And all that's around for me to collect are a few autograph cards I don't own or a bunch of parallels. I've mentioned this the last few Cey birthday posts, and I was starting to get sick of hearing myself repeat this lament. But then one day, while pondering cards to obtain, I looked to the ceiling and that's when it struck me: Of course, north! Go north! O-Pee-Chee!!! I don't know why I never thought of that before. I have OPC Ron Cey cards in my c...

Welcome to All-Star Week. This is one of my favorite times of year. Even though baseball has tried to ruin this week by injecting celebrities, causes and bounce houses into the All-Star Game experience and also water it down with hashtags, limited innings and tying it to the World Series, I refuse to let cynicism wreck my overall enjoyment of this time. I have loved the All-Star Game since I was a boy. It is not only a game, set aside to showcase the top players from that year and basically glorify baseball for one night, but it symbolizes all that I love about summer. Spectacular weather, spectacular food and that carefree feeling that you can do exactly what you want and what you want is to watch a baseball game full of players that you know. No matter what baseball tries to do, that template has remained the same since I was 10 years old and watching my first All-Star Game from Veterans Stadium in 1976. I need to celebrate this week so that when I'm enduring more mise...