Night Owl Cards

I've been feeling a little guilty lately about neglecting my 1980s card needs. All of my recent purchases have been related to vintage or Dodgers from the 1990s to the present. The poor '80s have been ignored. I don't have anything against the '80s, not at all. It's pretty much my favorite decade. While I prefer the '70s for cards and the '90s for god awful situations, the '80s are the overall winner. I continue to live in them when it comes to music, recounting past girlfriends, and the best memories of all-time. So why don't I gravitate toward the cards from the '80s? Well, probably mostly because I have so many of them. All the Topps sets are complete. And most of the Dodgers team sets from that time were finished off long ago. My favorites from Donruss and Fleer are done, too. That leaves the sets that aren't the greatest but do showcase the players that I grew up with, and that's why I'm still trying to complete some...

I wanted to write about the 1983 Topps glossy send-ins because I had recently decided I need to complete the 40-card set. So last night after work (and driving through a foot of snow), I wrote up a whole post on my love for the very first of the glossy send-in sets and just before hitting "publish," realized that I had basically written the entire post seven years ago . Ugh. Well, the cards are scanned already, now what? My curiosity is always buzzing so it wouldn't allow me to let go of the 1983 glossies that easily. I looked at the ones that I owned -- all of them obtained back in 1983 from sending in those "runs" cards that allowed you to pick a group of five glossy cards. I wondered if I could figure out which groups I ordered back then and why. I have 19 of the cards, which is interesting because there were eight groups of five cards each for 40 cards. Nineteen cards means I ordered my five cards four separate times, but somehow lost one of the...

I'll be the first to admit that I enjoy shiny cards. Topps Chrome was a wonderful invention. I've also learned to appreciate the Pinnacle Dufex era, although I wasn't collecting then. But really my fondness for cards with snazzy finishing began long before the mid-1990s. It started in the early '80s during the heyday of glossy cards. Although glossy items had been around for decades, even appearing in some baseball card sets, my first encounter with them were in the 5x7 cards sold in 1980 and 1981. They would come in these cool, oversized packs that we would buy at the Greek deli about a mile-and-a-half from my home. Then 1983 arrived and Topps announced that it was making a special 40-card glossy set available. The best part was all the cards were 2 1/2-by-3 1/2, like all the other cards we collected. But these cards weren't available in stories or in a catalog. You could only receive them after accumulating enough "runs" on an "All-Star B...

I like to keep my work life separate from my blog life. But there is one area where they intersect, and that is where "brush with greatness" comes in. I write about sports for a living. I was a sports reporter for a number of years, and now I am an editor, but I still do some writing and reporting. I work at a small newspaper. I never pursued a big-time paper job mostly because I wanted to raise a family and not cart them from place to place. So, because my paper is concerned with the local scene, I've spent years going to high school and college sporting events. It's actually an enjoyable career, even if it's a lot of hard work, doesn't pay a heck of a lot, and is pressure-packed. It's certainly not as glamorous as it seems to people outside my profession. There is one area where it IS glamorous, though. Despite the fact that my job is mainly about local sports (I have covered everything from field hockey to walleye fishing to sled dog racing), I have be...