Night Owl Cards

Right now the baseball buzz on social media is the World Baseball Classic. While I'm happy to see people talking about more baseball, I can't get into the WBC more than periodic glances. A few reasons just to make sense of how I feel:   1. We just had two weeks of an international sports event. I'm tapped out. 2. March has enough chaos and energy -- March Madness, right? I don't need more. 3. The WBC seems to run on star power, which really isn't my focus in baseball (Yes, I know the Dodgers have a ton of stars, I do feel conflicted about that).   For baseball all I need is the Dodgers and the other MLB teams that play the Dodgers. I have a difficult time getting invested in any other kind of baseball, whether that's Olympic, collegiate, Banana Ball or any of the many, many non-MLB leagues through history. I've found where my heart will reside forever -- as corporate as MLB may be now.   My collection reflects that -- in the pursuit of MLB-themed sets and, o...

   What would you say collectors who aren't bloggers think of us collecting bloggers, if they think about us at all?   Would they think we're wildly dedicated to the hobby? Probably not. But we are.   Would they think we're wasting our time, writing a bunch of words nobody has time to read anymore? Maybe.   Would they think we're stodgy, focused only on old cardboard (defined as anything before the '90s) and traditional ways of collecting -- buying packs, holding on to base cards. Some would, I think.   But I happen to think that card bloggers have the most varied and interesting collections. Sure, there's a bit of pack rat in all of us collecting bloggers, but those hoarded stacks of cards are so damn fascinating. In this world of specialization -- just take a look at what the grading aspect of the hobby focuses on -- I'm glad my collection is eclectic. It's not as eclectic as some but it's more eclectic than most.   All I need to do is look through...

   Trading cards takes a lot of time. Also, sometimes it takes a lot of work.   Everyone collects differently and sometimes it's difficult to match up with another collector. That happens all the time. No big deal really. Then there are the fellow collectors that drag out trades for too damn long.   I never participated in collectors forums, but I've heard that trades were often like that there. I have no problem trading away nice cards, but I'm not going to send a couple dozen messages back and forth to come to an agreement on an exact accounting of precise compensation. I've dealt with this in the past with a couple bloggers. It's not fun. Trading is supposed to be fun.   That's why I gravitate to super simple trades. My favorite are: "I'll send you some cards whenever and you send some cards whenever." That's how most trades go on the blogs. It's about the only ones I make these days.   It's also why I participate in stuff like Diamo...

  It's getting more and more difficult to fill the newshole -- industry term -- in a newspaper sports section these days. I won't get too much into the reasons why because: 1) it's still my job; 2) the rant will amount to the longest post ever; 3) you don't care, just look how many people have newspaper subscriptions. But just to transition to the cards more easily, I will say that NFL copy is always there for me. I've written about his before. The NFL never stops. There's no offseason anymore. It's June -- where once football would go silent for like four months until late July camps, now I can depend on a roundup of NFL news every single day. Granted, a lot of it is the stupid he said-he said, he said-she said, she said-she said stories that now pass for "news" in sports journalism (the latest example: the Caitlin Clark foul heard round the world). But empty space doesn't sell, so NFL it is!   The NFL is filling space on this blog today, too....

  I've talked about my history of collecting football cards here and there. Most of my childhood football-collecting involved the 1977 and 1979 Topps football sets. I also saw some 1975 and 1976 football a little bit but I didn't collect any. When the 1980s hit, I ignored football cards completely. But I still watched it all through the decade. I remember Jaworski and Plunkett, the 1982 shortened season, the Ickey Shuffle; the Redskins teams and the Smurfs, Marcus Allen, the USFL, Marino-Duper-Clayton, The Fridge, Dit-ka, Kelly landing in Buffalo, the Eric Dickerson trade, the Broncos and the lopsided Super Bowls, and 49ers-Bengals Part II. I was there for it all. But football cards? I couldn't have told you most of the designs 15 years ago.   I've slowly caught up and there are a few '80s Topps football designs that I've long admired -- not enough to try to collect any of the sets, but enough to be attracted when the cards are essentially free. During the most ...