Night Owl Cards

  I'm making good on a promise I wrote back in July with this post, with just one day to spare.   During the last One-Card Wonders post I finished all the 1970s one-card wonders and said I wanted to do the same with the 1980s in the next post, which I said would happen before the end of the year.   Well, the end of the year is here and I can't let all those people who have been waiting for the last five-plus months down! So don't worry, be happy! The last OCW post of the year is here!   In this episode I'm covering 1988 and 1989, the only years I haven't touched from the 1980s. I'm also tackling not only the Topps sets from those two years but Donruss, Fleer, Score and Upper Deck, too (This means I'm technically not done with the '80s after this post because I still haven't uncovered OCWs for some of the other 1980s Donruss and Fleer sets).   As a reminder, I define One-Card Wonders as cards of players who appeared on one major release only. I discou...

  I've been tired of the emphasis on the rookie card in Topps products for years. I don't know how many posts I've devoted to rookie-overkill, but it's certainly a running theme and I'm sure it's boring some readers to tears.   I do know that Topps, and the hobby, has been about rookies, and young players in general, for a long, long time. I'm thinking of the Sporting News Rookie Stars subset in 1959 Topps and similar themes that came after, followed by the multi-player rookie card themes throughout the 1960s, '70s and early '80s.   Then there are the rookie trophies and rookie cups, the All-Topps teams. Those have been around for quite awhile, since 1960!   But obviously the focus is on those youngsters even more these days and you could point to various moments all the way to the present in which Topps (or other card companies) ramped up that focus, through special subsets, inserts, autograph cards, short-prints, etc.   Today I'm pointing at 19...

  I was looking at a football card on one of the online shopping sites the other day. It wasn't anything I sought out, it just caught my eye. As often happens with football cards, I didn't know the set and I didn't know the player (I don't remember what card it was now). But I was curious about him and I quickly looked for what position he played. But there was no position listed on the front. That annoyed me (it doesn't take much). It's been a long time since I've written about positions on the front of baseball cards and I touched on this once awhile ago , so I figured it was time for another one. Let's do a little examination of sets that have not put the position on the front of their cards.   This will mostly cover Topps because as often happens with these historical card reviews, I get to the 1990s and it's just a mess and would take an army of spreadsheets to sort out, and, guys, I still have a full-time job.   But I will mention that Bowman p...

  Since today is a day off that, at least for most of my life, was set aside to recognize the discovery of something that had already been discovered, it goes nicely with my recent discoveries in 1989 Topps.   This is all stuff that has already been unearthed by someone else. Long ago. And it's common knowledge for a lot of collectors, probably most of whom were kids at the time.   But although I opened so many packs of 1989 Topps, a trip or two every week to the drug store to buy a pack or two or three or six, I missed all of these discoveries. I'm just not the exploring type, I guess. Or the observant type. Maybe it was all the beer that year. I don't know.   Stan Jefferson's card has a pink-and-violet triangle at the bottom left corner of his card. Huh. Didn't know that in 1989.   He also has just a violet triangle on his card in the bottom left corner (or maybe this is the pink-and-violet version and the one above is the pink version -- this stuff can get co...

  Last night at work I came across a Philadelphia Inquirer story suggesting that it was time to update the stats that are on the backs of Topps baseball cards. It was the familiar line you've heard before: the statistical categories we grew up with are antiquated, don't properly measure the value of a player, etc. And, although I've come to appreciate some newer stats like OPS, I'll never get a handle on all of them and, more importantly, I'll never care as much as I did with the other stats. There will always be a part of brain that values batting average and runs batted in because that's what I knew as key measuring stats for the first 25-to-30 years of my fandom. It's difficult to put that aside, and I'm not eager to see a bunch of new stats on the backs of my baseball cards (although the article headline doesn't seem to grasp that Topps has already incorporated a few of the newer stats on its backs). I don't think collectors these days look a...