Night Owl Cards

  I haven't done very well this year with completing sets. It's my main mission in this hobby, the reason I'm on this collecting earth, but so far in 2023, I've completed only an Allen & Ginter mini set from a few years ago. That is not going to cut it when the card collecting auditors pay their annual visit. But finally, 141 days into the new year, I've finished one. Last week I received a shipment from the baseballcardstore (more on that shipment soon, it's a wild one). These two cards completed the 1985 Fleer Traded set for me. Not really a big deal at just 132 cards but I'm still working on finishing off the main '85 Fleer set. I just need to find some cash, which has been the story of 2023 (now you know why I didn't complete a set the first four months of the year).   This completion though is notable because it's the first time I've completed any 1980s Traded set that was not a Topps set.   I love Traded sets and it pains me when I ...

  As a child of the '70s and '80s, the increasing exclusiveness of the collecting hobby has always thrown me.   To see cards described as "high-end" has never seemed right, and to see the prices people are charging for rather ordinary cards these days makes almost zero sense to someone who was paying 15 cents per pack as a kid. For the first half of my collecting life, cards have always been available. They were right down at the drug store or corner market. And they were cheap. Someone with a paper route could save enough money to buy a few packs every week if they wanted. This is why I like cards from the 1980s so much. The cards from the '80s were cheap and they ARE cheap. The vast majority of '80s cards cost hardly anything to own and that's the way cards should be. Save those costly cards for old, moldy tobacco cards or that Nap Lajoie guy who I always saw advertised in collecting catalogs for far too much money. The '80s would never do that to yo...

  I ran some errands yesterday and as I often do when I'm on that side of town, I journeyed through Target's monstrous parking lot to check out the card aisle, just for giggles. The reprieve on the plundering of card aisles that I came across only a month ago was no longer the case. Outside of a half dozen boxes of 2020 flagship complete sets, there were no baseball cards. Empty. I shrugged my shoulders and left the store. No loss. If people want to hoard 2020 cards, the cards that I find the least interesting of all the cards ever made, then go ahead. I'm not going to scream about sneakerheads and greedy ransackers like I see so many collectors do. I just don't care enough about current cards to care. Let them have it. They don't know what's good for them anyway. This weird pandemic-driven situation has actually sharpened my focus. I am far less scattered in my collecting than I've been at any point since I began this blog. Thanks to empty card aisles, I n...

All right, nobody cares about 2019 cards with four days left in 2019. That's what you're telling me. I get it. The only reason I care about them is because I'm a hopeless team collector. But actually my heart is somewhere else. It is somewhere far, far, away. From a distant place and time, back when there was just one set to collect -- well, maybe sometimes two -- but definitely not more than that. The cards were a lot more colorful. The players in the pictures didn't move a lot, but the graphics took care of that. They were bright and loud, and on the back, a cartoon balanced out the rows and rows of numbers. Yup, my heart is in vintage. That's what I'm saying. Whap! Vintage. David has sent me another Christmas box. It's the last of the Christmas card greetings to reach my house this year. And I was totally surprised. Not a soul told me that I was going to receive a 1953 Topps Joe Black card. Sweet mercy. I'm getting closer and...