Night Owl Cards

  Who am I kidding here? I can't evaluate the card year in 1995! There were 33 major releases in 1995. There were two sets with rounded corners! Two! Apparently card companies didn't hear that the World Series was canceled the year prior. But I did. I bought three packs of Topps in 1995. And then I exited, closed the door and didn't return to the hobby for a decade. My enthusiasm for this year in card collecting is very low. But it's not as low as for 1996 (foreshadowing). I'm incapable of an exhaustive breakdown of most of the sets from '95. I refuse to cover all 33. There were some suggestions to break it down in various ways, maybe cover the basic sets, and then a separate post for the premium sets and super premium ones. Yuck. I don't even like referring to sets as "premium" and "super premium." So this is the problem. I want to evaluate a year by old-collecting means that doesn't fit into those standards. In 1994, I tried to take...

I like to think of myself as a simple man. I look around me and everyone everywhere is making things complicated. Complicated lives. Complicated policies. Complicated world. I like things simple. But sometimes I look at my blog posts and they aren't simple at all. A lot of them are long and over-the-top. The opposite of simple. That disturbs me sometimes. So I thought I'd do something about that and write a simple post. Here it is: Today was rather complicated. There were computer problems. There was an accident in the city that knocked out power during rush hour. There was my daughter's homework in which I had to teach myself a math concept that I hadn't thought about in 30 years. And this was all on a day off for me. The day was frustrating. Infuriating even. But it was a good day. You know why? Because I crossed off the last card I needed to complete my 1995 Score Dodgers team set. There is Tom Candiotti now. The card arrived to me from Ma...

Each night the local late night news presents a trivia question to the hack sports guy after he gets done butchering the day's highlights. On the weekend, the backup hack sports guy takes his shot at the trivia questions. My guess is the only reason the backup guy is still employed is that he's no threat to the primary sports buffoon. That is demonstrated almost every weekend when he stumbles through trivia questions that the primary buffoon usually answers correctly. Last weekend's question was: "Which player was on a pre-World War I baseball card that recently sold for over $1 million at an auction?" This is easy for any card collector to answer. And I can even point out an error in the question. The card in question -- the T206 Honus Wagner -- actually sold for over a million dollars in 2000, which is now 12 years ago and no longer "recent." But the poor weekend sports boob's answer was this: "it's either Christy Mathewson or T...

I have this sudden, overwhelming desire to categorize, compartmentalize and marginalize a whole mess of baseball card sets. So I pulled a small stack of cards from various years, and I'm going to try to give them a name on the spot. I can tell you already that I'm going to be successful with some and a failure with others. So I'll need your assistance as always. If you think you have a good name for these sets, yell out your answers. Even if I've come up with a name, there's always the chance that there's something better. However, the 2012 Topps set has been named already and there's no going back. By consensus, it's The Surfboard Set. I'm not taking credit for that name. I believe steelehere was the first to come up with it as far as I know. So I'm giving him his due. Address your complaints appropriately. But really, it's a perfect name. So, let's move on to some sets that are more difficult to name: 1959 Topps deserves ...

I was in the midst of attempting to put together a convoluted night card post when I realized that it was never going to work, and I really should go with what worked best when I was nine years old: Study the hell out of the tiny little thing in front of you. I don't do that enough. The other day I was pulling some pennies out of my pocket and got a glimpse of one that didn't feature the usual Lincoln Memorial. I thought about how coins now feature a variety of items on them that they never did before -- and I have no idea what they are. I barely look at my coins. But when I was young, I studied my coins vigorously. I checked the date on every penny and memorized them. My dissection habits didn't end with coins. I would sit on the ground and examine the ants crawling along the sidewalk, building homes in the cracks that broke your mother's back. I would scour the backyard for just one, solitary four-leaf clover, but instead turn up hundreds upon hundreds of thr...