Night Owl Cards

(I think Topps/Fanatics has succeeded in curbing my craving for current product. Between the months and months that pass before a new set is released and nothing showing up on shelves regardless, I'm losing my interest for anything that isn't flagship or Heritage. Topps Holiday? Don't care. A&G hasn't shown up yet? Don't care. Thanks, Topps. I'm cured! Time for Cardboard Appreciation. This is the 358th in a series):   I came across this card on social media the other day. It was one of those 1980s cards that I had never seen before, showing a player I had never heard of until that moment. This still can happen with mid-1980s cards when I was apart from the hobby.   Still, it's enough of a rarity that I was stunned. Dave Shipanoff? Who? How had I never heard of him? The first thing I did was look him up on baseball-reference.   I discovered he played for the Phillies just one year in the back half of the 1985 season. He appeared in relief in 26 games, sav...

  I have the three cards that I claimed in the latest Diamond Jesters Time Travel Trade series to show off today.   They all have something in common, which I didn't realize when I was requesting them.     Each of the cards are from 1986. This is interesting to me. Out of all the years in the 1980s -- and  I have a lot of cards from that decade -- 1986 is the year that contains the most holes.   I look at cards from 1986 with some unfamiliarity. This goes back to where I was at in life at the time. As I've mentioned very often, '86 was the year I broke free from my card collecting ritual. For 10 years I made sure to purchase Topps cards (and then Donruss and Fleer) in some sort of fashion each year. But in 1986 I was away at college and didn't bother with cards, not even a little.   This is why I've long considered 1986 Topps as a "mysterious" set. When I was finally collecting it during the first year of this blog, I discussed how fascinated I was wi...

  Last month when I received a very kind delivery of free cards from the baseballcardstore.ca , I resolved to get on the site quickly and pay for some cards to show my appreciation. I sort of succeeded ... until Steven from the baseballcardstore jumped in and thought he could help me with my effort by finding more stuff for me, even better than I could, that would fit perfectly into my collection.   Let me tell you how that happened.   I started on the site like I always did, by searching for various sets. That's hit-and-miss for me because most of the sets available on there aren't what I'm looking for, as you can imagine as a vintage guy. I also look for Dodgers I need, which is even more difficult, because I have a lot of Dodgers.   So the set search began, and without coming up with any 1985 Donruss baseball, I decided -- heck, might as well pursue some cards from the set I've been avoiding all my life.   Yeah, this thing -- the thing I've been making fun o...

  In my current state of gathering 1988 Donruss (down to one card as of today!), I was reminded of a border feature from the mid-'80s to early '90s on those Donruss sets. The border patterns lined up if you positioned the cards just so. So I did it, just to finally see what junk wax fans were talking about and ... yeah, to get an easy blog post. The first four Donruss sets all featured white borders, but in 1985 it started go with colored borders and it also started doodling inside the borders. I was not a fan of Donruss doodling, as I've said many times most of those '80s Donruss sets just don't look that professional to me, compared with their counterparts at the time. But I'm not above collecting them or lining them up. The 1985 set featured black borders and red racing stripes that you could line up with any other card. Then in 1986, Donruss decided to just put lines all over the entire card. It's pretty easy to line these up with approximately 100 lines...

I was perhaps a little harsh on the Yankees at the end of yesterday's post. Not that I care -- still fully want them to lose by many runs tonight -- but I'll throw a tiny chicken bone their way. I visited my favorite thrift store back in my old hometown Monday. It hasn't been very productive for baseball card hunting the last several visits, but I did find one station that had the usual selection of junk wax sets (the Big 3: 1990 Fleer, 1990 Upper Deck, 1989 Topps). Above those boxes were a few individual stacks selling for a couple of bucks each. I brought home two that mildly interested me. One was a 1983 Fleer stack with Keith Hernandez on top. The other was a 1986 Donruss stack with Don Mattingly on the top (third-year cards are so underrated). I thought they were random assortments of '83 Fleer and '86 Donruss, but it turns out they were team sets of the Cardinals and Yankees from those years (I didn't put two-and-two together as there was a Card...