Night Owl Cards

    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...

  OK, making very modest progress on attempting to put this series to bed. This is the second edition of this series this year, improving on my one-per-year schedule from the last few years. But still got quite a few sets to get through as I travel backwards through the sets I've completed. The last set I covered was 1983 Fleer, and now it's '82 Fleer's turn. This is where I determine the "Team MVP" for each team in a particular set, what I think is the best card. I bought a fair amount of Fleer in 1982. Like in 1981, I was attempting to collect all three sets, which was foolishness for someone on a paper boy's salary. But that's all I knew. I ended up with somewhere around 300 cards in the set, but it was enough to get an idea that the set was not well-photographed nor cropped all that great. However, I like the set a lot, for the color-coordinated borders, the extremely weird and interesting photos and for providing a solid look at the day in the lif...

  Just a simple post today because where's the time? I'm waiting for a couple of online orders to arrive, one from COMC and one from sportlots. I placed the sportlots order a number of days after the COMC one but I'm sure I'll see the sportlots order first, as COMC claims they're back but are they really? The sportlots order contains the Steve Garvey card you see here. I know the image is from the COMC website but the Trading Card Database image of this card is in rough shape. It's good to get a new Garvey card because they're a bit pesky to acquire as I've mentioned before. So many fans. He's been pretty accessible these many years after his playing career ended and I was listening to the TTMCast podcast a few days ago in which Garvey was the guest. He was such a pleasant interview as always. Garvey discussed cards a little bit and mentioned that some of his favorite cards to sign are from 1981 because that's the year the Dodgers won the World S...

  I received a mailer the other day and I can't decipher the sender. There's the familiar "ebay" shipping label in the front, but the cards inside, although tailored to my interests, aren't anything I ordered. The return address has a female name, but I don't recognize it, and with the amount of female collectors I've come across during the life of this blog, I would know if she was a past trader. The envelope came from Minneapolis, and again, the collectors I know from Minneapolis don't go by that address and none of them have a significant other with that woman's name, I don't think. I don't know. I don't know them that well.   So, with no note and nothing else to go on, I have to assume it's some bygone acquaintance.   This blog is in its 13th year and I've communicated with hundreds of collectors and received almost as many packages. The list of bloggers who are no longer blogging about cards is massive and impossible to fit...

  I completed the 1982 Fleer set today. This is the fourth set I've completed in 2021 and it was long overdue. According to the labels provided by blogger, I have written about 1982 Fleer more often than any other non-Topps set. This is post 44 about 1982 Fleer, breaking a tie with 1993 Upper Deck. (For those suddenly curious about which baseball sets I've written about the most, here ya go: 1975 Topps - 259 times 1956 Topps - 146 1972 Topps - 135 1977 Topps - 99 1971 Topps - 94) If I've written more than 40 times about a specific set, I probably should be completing the thing. So, thank goodness, 1982 Fleer is done. I just rechecked. These are the last four cards that I needed: Three Hall of Famers and -- what the heck? -- Jim Slaton? Slaton was the second-to-last one, too, pulled out of an envelope just before the Tim Raines card. I think I've written so much about this set basically for the same reason that I seek out interesting stories -- human interest stories -- ...

(Here we are at another blog milestone at Night Owl Cards. This is the 300th Cardboard Appreciation post! I've been running this series since the first one dropped on Oct. 13, 2008 . They arrive much less frequently these days -- and they're a lot longer. But it's still going! I also think we're not too far off from voting for a new member of the Cardboard Appreciation Hall of Fame, so stay tuned for that. But now, it's time for Cardboard Appreciation!): I can't believe how long it took me to obtain this card. It's really my fault. I should have focused on finishing the 1982 Fleer set a long time ago. But I have known about the back story on the '82 Fleer Rod Carew card since the cards came out that year. It's a commonly told story now -- and has been referenced on the blogs many times -- but back then only the magazine rack would tell you. In the spring 1982 edition of Baseball Cards magazine, a segment near the beginning of the edition reviewed the...

  As a child of the '70s and '80s, the increasing exclusiveness of the collecting hobby has always thrown me.   To see cards described as "high-end" has never seemed right, and to see the prices people are charging for rather ordinary cards these days makes almost zero sense to someone who was paying 15 cents per pack as a kid. For the first half of my collecting life, cards have always been available. They were right down at the drug store or corner market. And they were cheap. Someone with a paper route could save enough money to buy a few packs every week if they wanted. This is why I like cards from the 1980s so much. The cards from the '80s were cheap and they ARE cheap. The vast majority of '80s cards cost hardly anything to own and that's the way cards should be. Save those costly cards for old, moldy tobacco cards or that Nap Lajoie guy who I always saw advertised in collecting catalogs for far too much money. The '80s would never do that to yo...