Night Owl Cards

The farther I get away from the age 18-49 demographic, the more the players that dominated the sports scene for seemingly forever fade out of the conversation.   You could have never convinced me in the 1970s and 1980s that guys like Reggie Jackson would slowly disappear, that their names would cease to be on everyone's lips, on every magazine cover, in every card set, in every sports column and TV broadcast.   Fewer and fewer sports fans can relate to the significant players and moments of the '70s and '80s and, yes, that means I have less to discuss on social media sites and the like. There are more modern players and moments that get all the attention and I sit on the sidelines either puzzled or with nothing to say.   One of those notables of the past who has become less and less significant with each passing year is Steve Garvey. I know a lot of people my age don't want to acknowledge that, but it's true. If someone isn't a Dodgers (or even Padres) fan and d...

  There are some cards that can only be appreciated -- truly appreciated -- by collectors who grew up in a specific period of time, maybe within only half a decade.   For instance, consider the 1979 Topps George Foster card, which many collectors my age have. If you are one of the legions of collectors who started with the 1987 Topps set or maybe the late '90s, or on the other end, in the 1960s or early 1970s, you can't appreciate the sizeable impact this card had on us.   In 1979, I didn't know a card without a logo on the helmet or hat. Logos were always there -- even if they were drawn on by Topps -- they were there. This was the period of Necessary Team Logos. I didn't know the time in the late '60s/early '70s when Topps would cover the offending hat logo with some black ink. I didn't know the 1970 Milton Bradley set. Conversely, I didn't grow up in the mid-to-late '80s, when unlicensed sets and empty hats re-emerged with oddballs from Burger Kin...

I write a lot about the cards I collected as a kid. It's the period of collecting that means the most to me. I want as many of those cards as I can get. But I don't like everything that happened with cards and my collecting habits when I was a tiny cardboard addict. I have spent a lot of time and money on updating the cards I collected because I am much pickier about card condition than I was then. The very first cards I bought from packs are suitable for framing, sure. But for collecting? I can't have it. So I updated my entire 1975 Topps set from the ones I accumulated as a 9-year-old. It only made sense, I had to get all the cards that I didn't find as a kid, and adult me certainly wouldn't go looking for versions that were scuffed, bent and lacked corners, and the OCD wouldn't let me mix mintier cards with moldier cards. I did the same with 1976. And 1977. That's where I stopped. Because with upgrading it always feels like you're spending...

This has been a weekend of discoveries as it pertains to my hobby. It's been little things, mostly, but collecting cards is all about the little things anyway. It's not a big-deal kind of hobby ( Look what I found during my trip to Tibet! ). To start, it's coming up on the year anniversary of my mom's passing. The only reason I mention that is because I realized I've just reached the mental state where I can go through the many, many family photos -- a significant number taken by my mother -- that I removed from my parents' home when we were cleaning it out last summer. Back then I had taped the albums up in boxes and then transported them to my house where they sat in the basement for months because I couldn't begin to look at them. But now I'm starting the long process of scanning and uploading and downloading, etc., and remembering fondly the old times and old friends. This is a photo of me and my brother and my mom. We're at a par...

The happenings late last night in Anaheim, California, were pretty amazing. There are times when I wonder whether emotion supersedes talent -- something I know happens all the time on the high school and college level -- in major league games. You'd think that MLB players are so talented, so driven that emotion would never have a chance to determine a game's outcome. Then you see something like last night's combined no-hitter immediately after honoring departed teammate Taylor Skaggs and you just know emotion had everything to do with it. Thank goodness there are games like these. Sports is so plagued by hype and announcers, bloggers and fans screaming UNBELIEVABLE every 30 minutes that performances sometimes lose their meaning. Then a game like the Angels' game last night reminds you what "unbelievable" truly means. (Personally, I'd rather announcers yell "INCONCEIVABLE" every time they're amazed by something. It'd be a lot more...

One thing that almost never gets discussed on the blogs is upgrading cards. I wrote a couple of short posts back in the early years of the blog titled "the joy of an upgraded card." They didn't get a lot of attention. In fact, I felt like a contrarian when I was writing them. I got the sense that most bloggers didn't care much for upgrading. They liked their cards manhandled. They liked them to "have a story." I never understood that. If I acquire a card with a story, it's someone else's story. I don't want that. It's my collection. I want my stories. So, I quietly dropped the series. But I've still gotten a thrill out of upgrading my cards all of these years. I'm not a serious upgrader. (If I was, I'd be a plain "grader," and send my cards to get slabbed, so nobody could touch them. I may not want my cards to be dingy, but I certainly don't want them sitting encased in plastic). I don't think about up...

Everyone has a "coming of age" year. For me, that year was 1979. I've mentioned the year several times in previous posts. It was a year that formed some of my views on life and a year that produced some meaningful moments and lessons that I follow to this day. It was also the year that I began to appreciate music for more than what was played on the radio. I made my first store purchases of music in 1979, most of them coming in the form of 45s, because I couldn't afford an album. One of those 45s was " Pop Muzik " by M. I adored this song. It was unlike anything playing on the radio at the time (we were still on the disco down slope), and its quirky, robotic nature appealed to me. I bought the record at a guitar shop on the same street where I bought baseball cards. I proceeded to play the hell out of the Robin Scott masterpiece ("New York, London, Paris, Munich") and its B-side, "M Factor". "Pop Muzik" is one of the ...