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...

(Happy National Bird Day! On this day, I think someone like me should have the day off. And I do! Time for Cardboard Appreciation. This is the 347th in a series):     The 1978 Topps Manny Mota wasn't the first Mota card I ever saw -- that would be the '71 Topps Mota that I spotted in the street -- but the '78 was pretty prominent during my younger collecting days. That Mota card was one of the double-prints in the 1978 set. Topps graduated to 726 cards in '78 and that caused some of them to be printed more often (I don't know the printing math behind this but every year that Topps totaled 726 cards -- 1978, 1979, 1980, 1981 -- some of the cards were double-printed). So since I was pursuing Dodgers, the Mota was easy to find. So were the Mike Garman, Steve Yeager and Tom Lasorda cards -- all double-prints. But Mota showed up most (though not quite as much as Jose Baez and Barry Bonnell). Multiple versions of the same card was still a novelty for someone who couldn...

  I admittedly have a tough time updating my want lists these days. Early on, my want list was just for myself. Written in a notebook or later on a spreadsheet, I was the only one who saw them. It didn't matter if they were updated, though I certainly got a thrill over crossing out a previous need in ballpoint pen. But if I skipped the process occasionally, it didn't matter. Then I started a blog and people noticed and they started sending me cards and I added a want list to my own blog that was Very Important. People from far away consulted it and tried to keep it as up to date as possible. If I didn't, folks would send me dupes -- not their fault -- but I already had plenty of those. Then TCDB came along, which was a much more efficient way to create and maintain want lists. I created one over there and now it is more accurate than the want lists on my blog. But I've kept the want lists on my blog because I think people still check them sometimes and also it's a l...

  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...

  I always feel a bit sheepish writing about upgrading cards in my collection. Most of my card upgrading happens "underground," meaning I usually don't write about it. It feels very much like a first-world problem. But I shouldn't feel that way. First of all, just about any card collecting "issue" is a first-world problem because the hobby is a first-world hobby. Anything that I write on here that I consider "a problem" is not really a problem. Secondly, I'm not encasing my cards in plastic and assigning them a random number based on condition. Since there are plenty of people doing that -- and I still have almost no idea why -- I shouldn't feel weird about upgrading. All I'm doing is finding a different copy that doesn't have wrinkles or worn corners.  A portion of my recent sportlots order was upgrades -- a few of them quite overdue. I'm going to show off each of them and explain why they were upgraded.     1978 Topps Reggie J...