Night Owl Cards

A few days ago, I read at Dodgers Blue Heaven that Panini was releasing its Cooperstown series again this year, and that each base card had three different versions. One card number, three photo variations. I shook my head at Panini, which I still have difficulty considering a legitimate baseball card company, pulling something that many take Topps to the woodshed over year after year. But I realized I was reading this at the same time I was unearthing card variations from sets that are decades old, which arrived long before what we consider as the era of variations/parallels. For instance, the above card from the 1983 Authentic Sports Autographs series. The series featured 12-card sets of 11 different Hall of Fame players. Each set also had a separate version in which the first card was autographed. Oh, and you can also find the cards with red or green borders. Which explains this: Each of these are card No. 10: Then, not long after I came across that, I came a...

I don't how many of you go back through your old blog posts. I end up doing it a lot myself, mostly for researching. Often I wince over what is written. It's not that I don't like the writing. It's mostly related to how ignorant I sound about cards. When I start reading those old posts, it becomes obvious that what this blog is really good at is explaining how little I know about cards. "I have no idea what this is," "can someone out there clue me in on what this is?", "clueless Night Owl here, don't know what this set is called." In a world of blogs and tweets in which people talk about how much they know and deride others about how little they know, I'm constantly pointing the finger at myself. I've got to stop that. But the fact is, there's a lot I don't know about cards, and sometimes I gain knowledge at a later date, and don't go back to the original post and comment or update with the new information...