Night Owl Cards

  I know people who absolutely despise their email. For them, it lost that late 1990s excitement long ago. Their email is now filled with all of the things that we detest about regular mail: junk sending, political badgering, business pandering, etc. My email is filled with those things, too. Every day, when I get up at 11 or so, one of the first things I do is sweep out any garbage that's found its way into my email overnight. But then there are the other things that make my email still worthwhile. A couple of months ago, P-Town Tom from Waiting 'Til Next Year sent an email telling me there was a collector he knew that was looking to connect with me. He had some cards for my collection. Well, as much as I feel awkward about sending a response to someone I've never met solely to say, "Yes, give me free stuff," I certainly was happy to get that email! And I was even happier when the collector, Richard, sent me the cards! You want to see what happens when you respo...

I don't do breakfast. I usually rouse myself out of my tree hole around 11 a.m. (although it's been a lot earlier lately for a variety of inconvenient reasons). By the time I'm ready for food, everyone else is at lunch. And because I consider lunch food infinitely more desirable than breakfast food, I simply slide into lunch with everyone else. Breakfast rarely exists in my world. This, no doubt, is heartbreaking news to whoever came up with the slogan, "breakfast is the most important meal of the day." They have no shot at shoving burnt toast and scalding coffee down my throat. The Eggo and Jimmy Dean people are powerless over me. I sound pretty smug about that, but I admit, this would be a tragedy if people were still putting baseball cards in and on cereal boxes. I'd have to eat cereal for lunch, I guess. Which would be quite the sacrifice because, boy, do I ever love sandwiches. Breakfast being the most important meal of the day would only mak...

I'm probably not going to be able to do something like this on the 4th of July, so I need to take advantage of my patriotic holidays while I can. It's Memorial Day. The flag is out, the street is blocked so the parade can go through, and everyone will be eating barbecue and pie later while I'm working. I'm trying to keep away the cranky by making a list, which has been a tried-and-true tactic in behavior control since I was a youngster. I thought it might be nice to try to find the most patriotic baseball card sets ever made and then do a countdown. But of course before I do this, I must have rules. Arbitrary rules is another technique that helps me forget about things I can't have, like three-and four- and five-day weekends. The rules in this exercise are: no insert sets or subsets allowed. There are several flag-flying insert/subsets, like the Collector's Choice card featured here. But I want these sets to really go all the way with their patriotism...

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"...

When I am asked what my least favorite set of all-time is -- and I am asked that on a regular basis because people come up to me on the street daily and say, "Night Owl, what's your least favorite set of all-time?" and I say, "Get away from me. Read my blog. That's what the comments section is for" -- my mind goes immediately to 1986 Donruss. I have no attachment to 1986 Donruss whatsoever. I was in college at the time. I hardly collected. I didn't see a single Donruss card that year. The Jose Canseco phenomenon completely passed me by. It was as if the set never existed. Until I saw a card from the set years later. Blimey! What a horrendous-looking design. This is a case in which horizontal on a card does NOT work. I have wondered on the blog what a binder full of 1986 Donruss does to a person. My theory was that if you stare directly at it, you will suffer convulsions. Someone else suggested that staring at the hypnotic effects of '86 Don...