Night Owl Cards

Christmas greetings, everyone! This is your official Christmas post of 2011. Don't expect anything else until after the big day. I'll be too busy rolling around in relic and autograph cards. (Pause so everyone can recognize the sarcasm) This Christmas Eve, I'm pulling out the Define the Design segment to see if I can find some Christmas-related names for some sets. It's actually not that easy. Christmas, of course, is filled with iconic symbols -- trees, wreaths, elves, sleighs, Heat Miser, Snow Miser, etc., etc. So, naturally, baseball card designers would probably go out of their way to avoid anything that can be associated with Christmas. Baseball and Christmas don't really mix. But that doesn't mean I can't mix them! Most of these names won't make the official Define the Design file. This is just a holiday thing. But a few I like enough that they may stick. So put on your Santa hat and let's go: 1994 Post: The Christmas Set...

I don't have very many thoughts about Panini's advancement into the baseball card market. After all, I'm not moaning in a fetal position about the Topps monopoly, although I certainly welcome more cards to view. Also, Panini, to this point, has operated in areas that don't interest me. I don't care at all about collecting other sports. When someone posts about hockey cards, I try really hard to pay attention, but it's almost like trying to learn a foreign language. I know it's good for me, but please, please, please make it stop. It's even worse for football or basketball or, god forbid, auto racing or wrestling. I simply change the channel without reading a word. So, Panini has been a non-entity so far. That is, until Josh Hamilton started popping up everywhere yesterday wearing his gold chain and T-shirt on a sample Panini baseball card. The card, I will say, is ok. "OK" in lower-case letters on purpose. If all the other cards look lik...

The last time I put this title on a post, it was to let people know that as a consumer you can go to your local retail outlet and pull something grand from the card aisle. But this time I'm coming to you from the viewpoint of the poor sap who works at the retail store. I've worked in retail a few times in my life. I worked at a department store in the mid-80s that basically doubled as a singles club. It was one of the greatest times of my life during those two years. I worked in another department store during college. I also worked at a drug store just out of college while looking for a full-time job. It was during that time at the drug store that I discovered cards printed on the bottom of boxes. It was an entirely new concept to me at the time. Since I was the only non-supervisor male working at the store, I got stuck with hauling the discarded boxes back to the stock room and tossing them into the trash compactor. The store sold cards, and while I was rummaging through bo...