Night Owl Cards

  Here you go, 2021 card collectors and companies, your cautionary year.   By 1994, card sets readily available to collectors had eclipsed 30 different kinds with various off-shoots and variations, demonstrating the company tricks that are still employed today. Collecting was no longer about the base set in '94 as "the chase" had become the thing and inserts and parallels exploded in content and popularity that year.   The hobby never seemed healthier or more vibrant. Then the baseball strike hit.   Fans left the game in droves and collectors walked away, partly due to the strike but also because the new direction of the hobby -- way too many sets to pursue -- didn't make sense to those used to the old way of collecting.   I was one of those who left in 1994. I collected some Topps, a few packs. That was it. By '96, I couldn't tell you a single thing that was happening in the hobby.   Those who remained, primarily kids who were just starting out in collecti...

A few collectors on Twitter have been relaying their stories on how and when they got into the hobby, when and why they quit (if they did) and when and why they came back to it. To those of us who have blogs, that information is already out there. It usually shows up within the first few weeks of writing a blog. And I've gone over the milestone dates in my hobby journey many times. But I'd like to go into more specifics regarding one of those dates, and that is when and why I quit this hobby. I've discovered that a lot of collectors turned away from the hobby at the same time I did (which is why the hobby scrambled so much during the second half of the '90s). It was in 1994, or thereabouts. And the baseball strike had a lot to do with it. But I don't want people to get the wrong idea about that. The baseball strike didn't make us so angry that we slammed down our cards and yelled, "THAT'S IT! Greedy no-good jerks! I'm never collecting aga...

Hello there. Miss me? I took a little break from blogging but I'm officially back. If you want to know the reasons I disappeared, it's nothing fascinating. Yeah, Blogger's inability to publish posts when I wanted it to was the instigator, but I went away for the weekend, too, and trying to goad Blogger into publishing posts while I was attempting to be on vacation didn't sound attractive. When you can afford to drop inconveniences you should, every time. And so I did. Those of you on Twitter know I didn't stay away from the community or the hobby totally. You also know I enjoyed a bit of hobby luck. I'll save that for tomorrow's post. But in the meantime, I did pick up some cheap old packs while I was away! I'm not in the habit of buying old packs, mostly because the ones most available are often from the last 25-30 years, and in most cases I'm not collecting that stuff. But these were staring me in the face, all for a dollar each, and I w...