Night Owl Cards

  One game-changer to writing my own blog was that no cards seemed to be out of my reach anymore.   What had seemed unattainable before was surprisingly doable, thanks to reader generosity and simply the publicity the blog has given me.   I've reminded myself of that blog phenomenon over and over and tried to rid myself of the "oh, I'll never be able to finish that" mind-set that has been my safety net against disappointment in this hobby for decades.   But there are still impossible quests. No one will be able to convince me that they are not.   The main one is completing the 1952 Topps Dodgers team set.   Supposedly it can be done. It's not like one of the cards is a 1 of 1. But it's still impossible to me.   Every collector knows about cards 311-407 in the 1952 Topps set, the high-number series in which many of the cards were off-loaded into the ocean because all the unsold cases were taking up warehouse space. The surviving fourth-series cards, alr...

Topps is never going to change. For as long as I have been collecting baseball cards, more than 40 years now, Topps has been creating alternate reality on its baseball cards. It has placed players into uniforms of teams for which they never played. It has moved an entire ball game scene from Boston to L.A. It has erased umpires and bat boys. It has pictured living players posing with dead players. And it hasn't just been Topps doing this. Fleer and Upper Deck and probably others each have their own very well-known examples. But this is a Topps card so I'm making it an example: what the heck are the Dodgers doing wearing red numbers on their uniform backs? This has been pointed out by at least a couple of other bloggers already, but I can't let it go as a Dodgers devotee. Red numbers have been a part of the Dodgers' uniform since 1952. They were created for TV. Owner Walter O'Malley liked the idea of bright numbers on the front that TV viewers could see....

Every time I land some of these 1995 Topps Archives Brooklyn Dodgers cards, I think about how they would have been more amazing to me back in the year that they were issued. I was barely buying cards in '95. And the stage of my collection was not as advanced as it is now. Many of the cards in the '95 Archives set would have had a great deal of appeal because of that. Back then, the only original '50s Dodgers cards that I owned that are also replicated in this '95 set were the 1956 Carl Erskine and the 1956 Don Newcombe. So how cool would it be to have a card that looked like the 1955 Jackie Robinson or the 1953 Roy Campanella or the 1956 Sandy Koufax, even if they weren't the actual cards? Well, now I have the actual '55 Robinson and the actual '53 Campy and the actual '56 Koufax. And I have the original cards for darn near half of the 1995 Archives set if not more. So the appeal may be diminished -- I already have a 1955 Topps Sandy Koufax du...

Do you ever wonder where the phrase "cards that never were" began? The internet and the blogs love the phrase. There are dozens of blogs devoted to "cards that never were" and probably hundreds of separate instances that have been showcased on sports- and collectable-related sites, underlining what the internet does: make something viewable that doesn't exist. The only problem is, I like my cards to exist. A digital picture is nice to look at for a moment. But if I can't touch it, then that digital image is not going to last. I will forget about it. That's why I like "cards that never were" to be printed out as a "real" card. That way, the "never was" becomes an "actually is." My favorite "what-if" "cards" (and in my mind they aren't actually cards until I can hold them in my hands) are the ones that exist outside of my digital screen. So, sorry about that mini-rant, back to my or...

Here's a question for you. Would you rather receive cards in the mail that are a surprise or directly off your want list? As usual, I like both ways. It's the reason I continue to buy packs and also post a detailed want list. I want what I want but surprise me. You'll see a semi-surprise package soon, but right now I want to praise some cards that I received that were expected -- because they are on my want list. I received a couple of PWE's recently from two different collectors. One is Chris from Twitter. This has to be the 4th or 5 envelope he's sent. The other is Mark from My Best Friend Collects Chipper Jones . I could tell as soon as I pulled the cards from the envelopes that people have been checking my want list. Some cards from Mark first: These are needs from the 1995 Topps Archives set. I've mentioned many times that my want list for this set is not correct, but these three were definite wants. One day -- probably when I think I ha...

I have what some people have said is an extensive want list on this blog. It has received 10,927 clicks as of this writing (I promise not all of them are from me). It has proven to be valuable over and over. But there is one flaw in my want list: It is a facade. A charade. A ruse. A front. An illusion. I am reminded constantly of how inaccurate my want list is. The most recent time was with a generous swath of cards sent to me by Johnny from Johnny's Trading Spot . Out of the Dodgers that he sent to me, just about half of the cards that I needed weren't on my want list. Why am I even keeping up this pretense? Let's take a look at the cards that weren't on the list and see if I can determine a reason in the world why I wouldn't have had them on my list. 1987 Sportflics Mike Scioscia Reason why it wasn't on the want list: I'm sure I thought I had completed the team set for this long ago. False confidence is the enemy of a respectable want ...