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...

Last fall, I mentioned that nobody will ever mistake me for a player collector. I list on my blog that I collect certain players, but that really never has been my primary collecting goal (I still can't get rid of the stalker vibe that I feel when I say I collect a certain player). I'm a team collector and a set collector first and that will always be my way -- at least until Clayton Kershaw has won his fifth Cy Young and I have accumulated enough of his cards that I can't maintain the "I'm Not A Player Collector" lie any longer. But, anyway, I mentioned in that post that I'm not a player collector because, despite my desire to collect specific players, I had almost as many cards of a player that I have not publicly stated that I collect than I had of any player that I HAVE publicly declared as a collecting target. And that player who is not on the official "Dodgers I Collect" list, but yet scads of his cards can be found in my collecti...