Night Owl Cards

  My first sportlots order of the year has been sitting on my rolltop desk waiting for me to brag about it.   It's not bragging material, really. There were a lot of upgrades that I don't need to show, but I sure did enjoy getting that 1977 Topps Joel Youngblood to replace the creased one in the set binder that I didn't even know was creased until a rare day of sunshine came through the card room (who knows how many creased cards are hiding in the Northeastern darkness of my home).   Some stuff has been put away already and others have been sitting in a stack waiting until the one last pokey sportlots seller finally snapped out his stupor and shipped the last card (this always happens).    I've determined what my 10 favorite arrivals are -- but there are more than 10 cards. Per usual, these are interesting mostly to me and could very well bore you to tears.      10. Gavin Lux, 2020 Topps Chrome   The last card needed for the team set. Can you...

I know it seems like I've settled on a schedule of posting every other day. But that's just March forcing me into that pattern. It's nothing planned. But you'll probably have to put up with it for at least a couple more weeks.   I'm finally getting to the other big send of cards I received over the last couple of months. This showed up from reader Bill K. about two weeks ago and I've been combing through it ever since. Here is an idea of what I pulled out of the box:   Those are four thousand-count boxes and they were all pretty much jammed full. The vast majority of it was Dodgers with a few "guys who used to be Dodgers" and an early '90s Buffalo Bills set added.   Bill said he's been cleaning out/pairing down his inventory, which if the boxes are indication was filled with cards from the early-to-mid 1980s to today. As you might have guessed, I had a lot of these cards already. I mean A LOT. Perhaps you've heard I collect Dodgers.   So mu...

    This is post No. 5500 on the blog. Not that the number means all that much, unless you tell someone outside the hobby that you've written 5,500 blog posts about accumulating cards. That will probably draw some sort of reaction.   To them -- most of them anyway -- it's all just mindless accumulation. It's all stuff for the throw-out man eventually. But to me, and the people who read this -- this blog isn't FOR YOU, people who think cards are dumb -- every card added has meaning. It fits into a specific category that pays tribute to whatever thing -- baseball, player, year, hobby -- that means something to that collector.   There's probably no more appropriate time than to go through some recent pickups -- wildly unconnected -- that have been occupying space on my card desk for too long. Yeah it's another show-off post. I'm 5500 posts in now, I can't change.   This will illustrate exactly how many kinds of cards I think are important and also that I ...

  Back before a virus turned the world and the hobby upside down, I used to attend card shows at the state fairgrounds in Syracuse with my friend Angus of Dawg Day Cards . Even before that, the shows at the fairgrounds would be held at the Horticultural Building, which is a fairly large facility that I had gotten used to as The Place for my card shows as it's where I went when I first got back into collecting all the way into a few years into writing Night Owl Cards. But then the show was downsized into the Science and Industry Building, which is smaller (but still impressive, I'm sure, to those who only know hotel and mall shows). I muttered about it on this blog, but at least I still had a show to go to. Heck, Angus couldn't even get across the border. It had been almost four years since Angus and I went to a show together -- April of 2019. But on Sunday, he was back in town and the show was back in the Horticultural Building, too!  This show was billed as a "Mega Sh...