Night Owl Cards

(A chilly welcome to you all on "Old Stuff Day". Apparently this day was created to encourage people not to do "the same old stuff" and then modified to encourage people to clean out their "old stuff." But I will choose to recognize the day by showing my card Old Stuff. Like I do many days of the year on this blog! Time for Cardboard Appreciation. This is the 349th in a series):   I added these two Drake's cards from Diamond Jesters' Time Travel series . The Drake's cards from the 1980s have always interested me for a few reasons.   a) The 1981 Drake's set was the first time I owned a complete set. It was very easy to do, all I had to do was send away for it and the 33 cards were mine. I wrote about it a number of years ago .   b) That same '81 set is numbered by race. Yeah, really. Coincidence or not, it's there as plain as the cardboard it's printed on. I did a post about that, too, after being tipped off by a commenter and f...

I remarked the other day that I missed everything that was on this card. That's almost true. I do miss seeing Carlton Fisk behind the plate. I do miss food issue cards with team logos prominently on display. I do miss Drake's cakes. I even miss those goofy-yet-functional '70s-style sun hats that folks in the stands are wearing. But if I'm being objective -- and not merely nostalgic -- I don't miss the uniforms the White Sox wore then. Sure, I like the idea of those uniforms, the time period of the crazy, everything-goes uniform style. But, really, the White Sox looked downright dorky when out on the field with another team that was wearing a regular uniform. It looked like they were playing a split-screen game, one-half from 1980 and the other half from 1911. This made me wince because, really, the White Sox were better than that. I like my established teams to wear classic uniforms. These uniforms do not change every 10 years or so. They remain basically...

I am not super strict in how I order my cards. My Dodgers are in order by year, then set, then player. My incomplete sets that are in either binders or boxes are in order by team most times, but by number periodically. But my complete sets? They are all in order by card number, almost without exception. I'm sure I've gone through this before. But searching for cards that you want when they are in order by card number can be an absolute pain. It's a lot easier to find a card if they're in alphabetical order (who has the time for that?) or by team. So that's why I have a lot of my sets in order by team. But I can put my complete sets in order by number because there is little chance that I am going to break up the set. I don't need to search for particular cards to trade or ship off to people, so I put them in order by number as the card maker apparently intended that to happen. I feel like I'm continuing a collecting tradition. I have done this fo...

The Collective Troll recently wrote a fascinating post about his appreciation for the Drake's Snack Cake "Big Hitters" cards of the 1980s. It was a tale of clutter, blossoming entrepreneurship, and junk food. I was riveted. It got me thinking about my own experience with Drake's cards. It had been a long time since I had thought about them, and that's a shame. Because those cards meant a lot to me for several reasons. The 1981 Drake's Big Hitters set -- the first Drake's set issued since the 1950s, I believe -- was the first card set I ever completed. No applause please. First of all, the set was just 33 cards. Second of all, I sent away for the thing. I barely broke a sweat. But none of that took away from the feeling that I had when I saw those 33 cards before me secure in the knowledge that there wasn't a 34 th card to collect. This completed task was on the heels of my failure to finish off the 1980 Topps set the preceding year, so I had a...

Andy, over at Traded Sets , is giving away some 2006 Mike Schmidt "rookie" cards. He's got a whole bunch and you don't have to do much to get one. One of the ways to obtain one of the cards is to mention his blog, which I kind of just did. I also have to email him the link to this post, which is the tricky part for me. Because forgetting to send emails is one of the things I do best. So, maybe if I go through all of my Mike Schmidt cards, and pull and scan the ones I like the best, and feature them here on the blog, my aging brain will actually retain Andy's contest rules and tell my fingers to tap out an email to him, and then I'll have another Schmidt in my collection! Sounds like a plan, doesn't it? I noticed a couple of things when looking at my Schmidt cards. First, his career corresponds almost perfectly with my first collecting phase. He began his major league career in the early '70s. I began my collecting career in the early '70s. He wrap...