Night Owl Cards

The 2020 Heritage team set for the Dodgers has been a milestone moment in terms of cars in the background on baseball cards. If there was a timeline for chronicling cars on cards -- or should I say "vehicles on cards," very few drive a mere car these days -- it would include the 1964 Philadelphia Jim Brown card, the 1973 Topps Luis Alvarado card, another card I'll show in just a moment, and several others. The latest stop on the timeline would be the Dodgers in 2020 Heritage.   Those are just a few examples. Most of the Dodgers Heritage cards this year feature a vehicle in the background if you look close enough. It has to be the most vehicle-infiltrated baseball team set ever. Even the two short-printed cards that I don't own yet -- Walker Buehler and A.J. Pollock -- each show cars. I love this and I've documented the reasons why a few times . I am a recovered Matchbox cars addict and vehicles were my obsession as a kid before baseball came al...

I was looking at the 1971 Topps football cards posted on A Penny Sleeve for your Thoughts yesterday and admiring just how fantastic the design was for those cards, when I remembered that I had meant to make a post about this some time ago. The '71 Topps football design is not my favorite of all the Topps football designs. I need to have an emotional connection to a design and I was too young to be collecting in '71. However, I do think the design is brilliant in its simplicity and in its ability to reach its target audience: kids. In fact, I think that all of the Topps designs for the big four sports that year -- football, baseball, basketball and hockey -- achieve the above goals. The cards issued in '71 across the board were: 1. Simplistic 2. Colorful 3. Fun 4. Got kids to notice That is why I think 1971 was the best design year Topps ever had. The football design is as enjoyable as opening the colored funnies on a Sunday. Each card displays a cartoon fig...

I suffered yesterday one of the great misfortunes that can happen to a modern-day card collector. A web browser crash ate my want lists. All of them. They're all gone. I'm not sure how it happened. I was updating the want lists with some cards that arrived in the last couple of days. I closed the file and then returned to my list of posts. That's when I got the rotating "loading" circle and -- wap -- the browser crashed. When I opened the blog back up and went to my want lists page, it was empty. Years of work and 60 years of want lists gone. The Internet Wayback Machine wasn't much help. It could retrieve my want lists from April of last year, but that would mean trying to track down a year's worth of updating and that didn't sound attractive at all. Shockingly, what did sound attractive was starting up my want lists from scratch. So that's what I'm doing. 2017 wants are already up and I've started on 2016. I've also j...