Night Owl Cards

  On a post a couple weeks ago, cards as I see them showed off his signed autographed cards from the 1978 Topps set. He has a whole bunch -- more than 500 of them -- which is terribly impressive.   That inspired me to see how many autographs I own from the 1975 Topps set, as like gcrl's 1978 Topps set, it is the one that kicked off my collecting journey.   I knew that it would be far, far less than 500. My collection pursuit has never been about autographs. It's been a side-dabbling at best, mostly restricted to my early blog days. But I figured that if there was one set that would yield the most autographed cards, it would be 1975.   Maybe I'd have 10 cards from 1975 signed, I guessed. Maybe a little less than that. Eight? Seven?   Try five.   Ooof.   But they're all impressive in their own right. That Bill Buckner doubles as an entry in my '75 buyback collection.   So, yeah, word scribbles aren't exactly my thing. But which set does have the mo...

    I forced myself to go to Walmart earlier today because they have the right-size mailing envelopes I need and then they didn't have them and I immediately became annoyed I was there and in a fit of self-loathing for such a stupid decision I walked to the card kiosk thing. The first thing I noticed was 2023 Bowman was out. There were blasters. But I don't buy stuff like that anymore. Outside of Bowman I saw blasters of 2022 Heritage High Numbers and Allen & Ginter and Panini Mosaic. Also fat packs of Optic and Topps team sets for just these teams: Orioles, Nationals, Red Sox, Braves and Cardinals. Come on, find me a Nationals fan here. There was also plenty of 2023 Topps Series 1, but I'm all done buying that. It did remind me though that I need to write a Define The Design post on the set as I try to do every year for flagship. 2023 flagship is fairly easy to name. That graphic treatment at the bottom is totally inspired by today's ballpark video scoreboards. Her...

  A comment left on the 1981 Fleer Team MVPs post hit the nail-on-the-there's-way-too-much-space-above-the-player's-head.   Dime Box Nick said that '81 Fleer is one of those sets where the "good" cards are really good and the "bad" cards are really bad. I had noticed exactly that while going through the set to write that post. And I was already in the process of developing a second post on the idea when Nick left that comment.   But I'm not sure that "bad" is the right adjective. And I didn't want to write anything like "Team Least Valuable Players." The vibe that I get from these "bad" cards in the set is that they're just plain awkward. That's the adjective I'm looking for. Awkward cards all over this set.   So I'm going to break down the Most Awkward Player per each team for the '81 Fleer set. It's perhaps the only set I could do this for ... except maybe half of the other Fleer sets from...

  One thing that I know is happening in 2023 is my 40th high school reunion. At least I think that's the case. I still don't know if I'll attend, but at any rate, I graduated from high school 40 years ago this year. Wow. Would I go back to high school if I could? Absolutely not. I think I have lots of company in that thought. But there are two things that I still like about that time. 1. I was younger. 2. The baseball cards. I have mentioned many times that the advent of three card companies issuing baseball sets all at the same time, was mind-blowing behavior for us youngsters. In 1983, the concept had lost a bit of its novelty -- I still hadn't completed anything two years into this new landscape. But two years prior, wow, the possibilities. In 1981, I was in 10th grade, still clinging to my kid ways. Cards at that time could be found at the drug store down the street, at the mini-mart down the block and at various delis and candy stores, gift shops, hardware stores, ...

(Around about now, I start hating rain and hoping for snow. It makes perfect sense to me, but it won't in March. Time for Cardboard Appreciation. This is the 308th in a series): I have written a lot about the cards that came out in 1981. Not only has it been 40 years since those cards were new, but it was the start of new era, of more than just Topps cards to buy, and it was a mind-blowing development for this collector. I was looking at this Bruce Sutter card earlier today, thinking that I have written everything I could about those 40-year-old cards. There is nothing left. But Bruce Sutter reminded me that there is. For example, 1981 was the first time since I had started collecting that I could look at each of the brands out that year and determine which player received the best treatment from the three companies. Which player had the best three-card display? This is something we've taken for granted since the 1980s -- heck in 2021 it would have to be which player has the be...

  This group put out a one-hit wonder 40 years ago and I had never heard it before this year.   That is shocking to me because 40 years ago would place me smack in the middle of high school and I knew every last song that was on the radio 40 years ago. Seven-Year Ache, Gemini Dream, Hey Nineteen, I knew them all.   But not " So Lonely ," a power-pop, do-wop throwback from a duo called "Get Wet," which barely cracked the Top 40, reaching No. 39 in April, 1981.   I heard it for the first time this year, listening to retro radio from 40 years back, and then weirdly, the video popped up on my recommendations and I thought, "there's no way this would happen with a baseball card. I knew ALL the baseball cards in 1981."   Um ... maybe not. Welcome to another edition of One-Card Wonders. We're in 1981 ... again. I covered 1981 in this series earlier but I looked only at Topps. So this time I wanted to see how the other two sets released that year did with ...

I have a feeling there will be more than two of these "Spot the Difference" posts, judging by the reaction to the first one. There were lots of responses to my last post on this topic, both in the comments and on Twitter, with additional examples of cards that feature design color elements that don't jive with the design colors used with fellow teammates. I thought I'd show some of those suggestions here, along with a couple others that I knew about that I didn't show the last time. The 1988 Topps set was mentioned a lot because it featured several color differences and I knew that. The one that gets mentioned the most is the Keith Comstock card, which is actually a variation that was corrected, which is why it received so much attention back in the "error frenzy" of the 1980s. The blue team letters is the correct version and the white team letters is the variation. But enough of that, we're here to find the differences that were n...