Night Owl Cards

  I went to a work Christmas party over the weekend. It was my wife's work, so I didn't know a lot of people there. That's always difficult for an introvert but at least there was good food! Often you're forced into small talk (eww) about mindless things. My wife knew almost everyone and was introducing a lot of them to me (really not necessary). Across the table sat a young man, maybe 23-25. My wife said he looked like actor Sean Penn. I'm not good at making famous people comparisons but this jumped right out at me, he definitely did look like Sean Penn. The young man, who I'm sure lives in one of the many rural towns in this area, said he didn't know who Sean Penn was. To help things along, I said Penn was once married to Madonna -- a pretty famous thing that happened in 1985. Almost no flicker of recognition. Certainly no response. OK. First, good for him for not caring. But second, HOW CAN YOU NOT KNOW WHO THESE PEOPLE ARE? Was 1985 that long ago?   Mayb...

(NOTE: The post is updated with a ranking by team of all the One-Card Wonders, also song links).   The last time I did one of these posts, I mentioned I wanted to tackle some of the 1980s sets to see exactly how many One-Card Wonders came out of that decade. I had my doubts. Three major sets starting in 1981. Four starting in 1988. Five starting in 1989. Good luck. The mission here is finding players who had a single card in a major set and then never again. But this was 30 years after the 1950s, the golden age of One-Card Wonders . Then I received a healthy stack of 1985 Donruss wants in a TCDB trade with Mokolai. These all should have been very familiar names, I was still following baseball pretty well at the time, lot of childhood guys still around. I was confident until this card appeared. OK, Charlie Mitchell. I have no idea who that is. It practically knocked me over with surprise. But I shouldn't have been surprised because a little while ago I received some '85 Donruss...

It's nothing short of bizarre how ESPN has started dictating the prices that people can charge for commonly available cardboard. Recently, people flipped out over the ESPN "Last Dance" documentary, which mercifully just ended Sunday. I don't have any problem with Michael Jordan or the documentary, in fact I will always be on the MJ side of any Jordan-LeBron debate. But I have zero interest in the NBA and watching Last Dance referenced all over my timeline the last few weeks is not how I want to enjoy my quarantine time. That's my problem though. What sellers have been charging for Jordan rookie cards (and other Jordan cards, I guess, I have no idea what those are) since the documentary came out could be your problem. If you're not a regular follower of the card market, that is. In other words, if you're thinking now is a good time to buy a Michael Jordan rookie, maybe hold off on that urge a few months or so, or probably a little longer than tha...

I said I'd be supplying updates on my progress working toward a "100 Greatest Cards of the 1980s" countdown, so this is one of those. I've reached 1985 in my search for the greatest cards. That's about halfway, although really it's not, since the latter half of the decade is when the amount of cards exploded and why this countdown will be so much more difficult than the 1970s Greatest Cards one that I did a couple of years ago. I dutifully marked down the cards that were candidates for the countdown, but as usual, I came across other things that I found notable. Specifically donuts. What the heck happened to baseball donuts? Now before you accuse this of being another "everything was better before" post, please know that I don't really care whether baseball donuts exist or not. With the exception of night cards, I don't have idiosyncratic collections like "baseball donuts on cards." So it doesn't matter to me muc...

There is a clipping pinned to a bulletin board at work just as you walk into the sports department. It is a copy of a high school sports game write-up from another newspaper. It's your typical roundup item, two paragraphs long. But those two paragraphs are so error-filled -- nine lines of text and about eight things wrong with them -- that the correction that the paper ran the next day is twice the size of the original roundup item. This amused me so much that I had to pin both items side-by-side onto the bulletin board. In the newspaper world, this is one of our greatest fears, that you will attempt to correct an error and just make things worse. So in typical black-humor fashion, I posted one of our greatest fears for all to see. I have never witnessed so many errors committed in one tiny space. Until I came across this Larry Milbourne card that I recently posted on my 1985 Topps blog. The back of that card is a treasure trove of mistakes. First, let's addre...

I still have some cards to purchase with birthday money. I wish it wouldn't take me so long to spend money on something I enjoy so much, but you know how life hates cardboard. When I do finally get those "birthday cards," you can be sure you'll see them. But for now I'd like to relay the tale of how my daughter found a thrift shop that had baseball cards for sale. I know. How's that for teaser? "What? How? Who in the world set up a thrift shop in night owl's barren outpost?" Well, settle down and listen. So, I always lament to myself whenever someone blogs about their latest thrift shop score, or flea market find or antique market steal. Those things don't exist near me, or if they do, they contain boring stuff like plates and salt shakers and, gracious, people sure have a weird idea of "interesting," don't they? There is an antique shop on the corner in the city that I've mentioned before. It used to be the...