Night Owl Cards

  It's been more than a year since I did one of these. There are reasons for that: These posts are brutally time-consuming and I should do posts like this in shifts, but I haven't learned to do that. Also, I'm covering a time period in which I didn't collect and also a time period in which set-collecting was going out of style.   But I'm plowing through, at least for another year.   It's 1997 and that sound you hear is me opening a single pack of Topps and thinking "well, that's enough of that."  That's all I did in collecting in 1997. But it was more than I did in 1996, which was absolutely nothing! For me, 1997 is about taking a job that I still have and preparing for the arrival of our first kid. All to the theme of "I get knocked down, but I get up again, you're never gonna keep me down." (Yeah, I know, you hate that song). Like in 1996, far too many sets were issued in 1997 and a whole bunch of them couldn't even muster 4...

I received my cards from Colbey's "Fleer Matte Finish" break a week or two ago. I entered this break because I needed just one Dodger from the '97 Fleer set -- and you see it here -- and I needed a load of Dodgers from the '96 set. You see those here. The Fleer sets from 1996 and 1997 aren't very exciting. In fact, the base cards are the polar opposite of what was going on in the card world at the time. But that's what makes these sets so interesting to me. What was Fleer thinking going in this direction? It's a common question among those who collect '90s cards. And when viewed from the angle of all of Fleer's base sets in the 1990s, it's just part of the strange route that Fleer took during this decade. From the point that Fleer returned to card making, in 1981, I considered them as another Topps. Fleer seemed -- to me anyway -- like it wanted to be Topps. Donruss demonstrated right away that it was not Topps, and as the years wen...

I bought no cards in 1996. I bought exactly three packs of cards in 1997 -- one pack of Topps, one of Donruss and one of Fleer. Even that far removed from the card-collecting hobby, I knew Fleer had done something vastly different with its '97 set. When I left the hobby in 1994, it was a glossy, glitzy world. It's still a glossy, glitzy world. But in the 1990s, if you wanted your card set to be purchased by collectors, you had better make it as glossy and shiny as the audience at a Hannah Montana concert. But Fleer -- apparently in the midst of a death wish -- decided to issue a set with a matte finish. I'm sure all the other card companies thought it was quite odd. It was as if your company decided to remove all of the computers in the office and replace them with typewriters. Whaaaa??? I realize Fleer did this first in 1996. But I like the card backs in the '97 set better. And I think it says something about Fleer that they did this two years in a row . Wha...

First, I'd like to direct your attention to the card that matches my blog layout the best (EDIT: that is before I changed my blog layout). I need to feature this card permanently on the blog somewhere. It's perfect. It's even better than the 1984 Topps Dodgers, which also had the yellow/blue theme going. This is one of the cards that came from Patricia and Lucy at Dinged Corners . They sent a great collection of Dodgers all the way from the land of Isotopes. I'm a bit jealous that folks like Patricia and Lucy, as well as Kris of Cards in the Attic, can see the Dodgers' Triple A farm team on a regular basis this season. I know if I lived there, I'd be in the stands all the time. The team's nickname needs some work, though. I much prefer the old Albuquerque Dukes. I know why they picked "Isotopes," but when I looked up the definition of the word, it just gave me a dull pain above my left eye. "Isotopes are any of the different types of atom...