Night Owl Cards

  This is the giveaway post featuring the extras from my winnings from The Diamond King vintage giveaway on his blog last month.   I'll reveal the cards I'm giving away and the entry instructions at the end of the post, so you greedy grubbies can scroll right to the end if you like.   But I wanted to mention that DK's giveaway also encouraged participants to send cards out themselves. This is something I still do, even after 18 years, though not as often the last 5 or 6 years (still there are cards on my desk right now that are waiting for packaging and sending, as it's always been). But Kevin seemed to strike a nerve as I was the beneficiary of three separate card sends that I believe were related to The Diamond King's request.   First let's see some cards I received from gcrl from cards as I see them . Neither of us needs instructions for sending out cards, especially to fellow Dodger fans, but we'll take any excuse!   Goodies of the parallel kind. Will g...

  I completed the 1980 Kellogg's set a few days ago by simply ordering the whole thing online. That's the way to do it when it's cheap enough. Oddball sets from this time aren't exactly easy to pull together piece by piece, although that's my preferred method.   The 1980 Kellogg's set doesn't get a ton of respect, probably because it's not a Kellogg's set from the '70s but also because it's the second set after Kellogg's decided to downsize the width of its cards, which set off all kinds of alarm bells among kids from that time. "Is Kellogg's trying to swindle us? I think it's trying to swindle us! "  I've come around on those '79 and '80 sets (and '83, too). They don't look too bad with those dimensions and those sets seem to be able to avoid cracking as often as the wider sets. 1980 in particular seems to be almost immune from major cracking -- or at least not cracking by someone just looking at it....

  I'm probably about the last blogger to get around to the holiday Pick Pocket goodies I snared from Julie at A Cracked Bat . So I best get to it. Most of what I want from the Pick Pocket offerings are Dodgers, of course, but also cards that feature players from my younger days or players from the '50s and '60s. So that usually means oddballs or retro cards. Julie has a lot of those and these are popular with some other bloggers, particularly Bo , who is way quicker on the draw with these cards than I am. But I managed to find a few and I thought I'd play a game with them that I am calling "Want List Worthy." The best cards often mean I like them so much that I want to complete the set that contains that card. And before I know it, I'm creating a want list for the set. So let's see which of these cards from Julie are from sets that are Want List Worthy: Raul Mondesi, 1994 Flair, Wave of the Future insert Chances of making a want list: 0% The main reas...

(Hi, and welcome to Cardboard Appreciation Week, again. You'll be happy to know that today is "Work-A-Holics Day." If you're working and you're spending time reading this, then shame on you. You're not honoring the spirit of the day. Time for Cardboard Appreciation. This is the 150th in a series): One of the most entertaining elements of the old Kellogg's cards has nothing to do with the front of the card. It is on the back of the card. Listed among the vital statistics -- height, weight, hometown, etc. -- is the mention of the player's hobbies. This is fantastic. Forget that 3-D action, I used to immediately turn the card over to see what the player did for a hobby. Most of the time, I was disappointed. Hunting was a big hobby. I've never hunted in my life, and the only kid I knew who hunted at the time when I was scrounging for Kellogg's cards was kind of a jerk. A lot of the time, the player would just phone it in when listing a...

I haven't always been thrilled by miniature versions of baseball cards. Sure, the 1975 Topps minis were a first love that flourishes to this day. But there have been times when I thought I was getting cheated by smaller cards. The example that has stayed with me all these years has to do with Kellogg's 3-D cards of the 1970s and early 1980s. For a collector in the '70s, Kellogg's was the only real alternative to Topps, not that we thought of it in those terms. Kellogg's cards were simply cool, strangely weird cards that you could pull directly out of the box of cereal that sat on the kitchen table. No need to go to a store at all -- well, mom had to go to the store, I guess. Nobody had invented a way for cereal boxes to magically appear on the table yet. Our only hope for accessing non-Topps cards were through buying the right kind of cereal. It was a pain-staking process. Hostess cards were already out of the question, because "that kind of junk"...