Night Owl Cards

This is that weird week where school and some government people are off but I'm not -- which gets even more awkward when members of the same household are off but I am not.   In other words, my time is not my own this week. Let's see if I can pound out a post before I'm swept off somewhere.   I finally completed the 2021 Update Dodgers team set the other day. The Corey Knebel card did not arrive when I ordered the team set online (a Royals card arrived in its place). When I alerted the seller, he said he'd get Knebel right out. He never did. Or the postal system ate it.   I put the card on my Nebulous 9 and reader Rich came to the rescue. What a relief. Very frustrating to have dupes of a parallel of this card but not the actual base card. More from Rich in a later post. Good stuff, too.     This card also completed a team set. I discovered that the Don Drysdale card was missing from what I thought was a completed team for the 1978 TCMA set, the 1960s. That had ...

One of the few cool parts of Twitter is the ability to connect with the very highest echelons of baseball and collecting. I'm not referring to stalking current baseball players online, although you certainly can do that if you wish. The cool part for me is seeing old-timers on Twitter and especially some of the card-collecting big wigs from back when I was a teen. Andrew Aronstein is frequently on Twitter. He's not an old-timer. But he is the son of Mike Aronstein, the man, who along with Tom Collier, devised the world-famous TCMA brand and created some of the greatest card sets of legendary ballplayers during the 1970s and 1980s. TCMA is responsible for solidifying my love for the history of the sport. Had TCMA not been around, I'd probably be chasing the latest and greatest prospect in an endless circle, with little regard for baseball cards' true calling, which is creating a colorful history of the best game in the world. Each month, in the pages of Baseba...

This is a card from the terrific 1978 TCMA set, "The 1960s." I received it from Dime-Box Nick , and the gesture has me half interested in chasing this set. Not only was it issued during a period when I was a youngster engrossed in every last baseball card issue -- there weren't a lot of them in the 1970s -- but it covers a period of time in baseball that's always been a mystery to me, 1960-69. It's not as much a mystery as the 1930s or 1910s or 1880s, mind you, but this is the '60s we're talking about here. I was BORN in the '60s. I should know something more about the guys who played baseball then, shouldn't I? A lot of this is my fault, of course, obsessing over '70s and '80s dudes while also trying madly to keep up with what's taking place on the diamond today. But a lot of it is other folks' fault, too. When people bring up baseball in the '60s, what do you always hear? Sandy Koufax. Bob Gibson. Roberto Clemente. ...

Here is the final part of my birthday loot. I landed some cash for the occasion, which is always thrilling and definitely not "impersonal." It wasn't a lot of money, but it was enough for me to decide to pick up a handful of Koufax cards. This is always a big decision because prices for Koufax cards never go down. In fact, I think they're going up by the hour, and in the near future we'll be talking about rumors of how Koufax was against chewing bubble gum, so he had the manufacturers pull his cards from all sets, and then Wayne Gretzky will buy one of his cards and they'll write books about it. But before we get to that point, I snagged a mere five Koufax cards. The first Sandy is the card at the top. It's from the hobby shop handout set from this year. It's a key find for me because I don't think my hobby shop -- which I rarely go to -- even has these. Maybe they do, I don't know, because I don't go to it. The card doesn't ...