Night Owl Cards

I've been in a bit of a 1990 state of mind lately, which isn't the greatest place to reside if you're talking cards. It's possibly the pit of all baseball card years. But I recently completed the 1990 Topps set and that's allowed me to see that set and the year in cards in a somewhat new light. I certainly won't claim it was one of the greatest years to collect, but I do have enough strength, finally, to determine the best set issued those 12 months. In 1990, a new decade mind you, the number of card sets grew at an even greater rate than the pace of the late 1980s. We were now up to seven major sets, and a host of other minor sets, such as Classic and Sportflics. For the sake of brevity -- and my sanity -- I'm keeping this post to just the seven major sets. It's still two more than I've covered in any previous edition of this series. And it will keep me in good practice for the 1990s insanity yet to come. Because the number of sets to cov...

If you've been reading this blog for at least a couple of years, you know that every year at this time I take a trip to a guy's home and rummage through his file cabinet for a couple of hours. I know that sounds questionable. It's not. It's part of a giant yard sale, spanning three towns, and his garage happens to feature a file cabinet -- more like a card catalog cabinet -- packed with baseball cards. Each of the last four years I have made a pilgrimage to his garage. It is one of five major card stops every year -- the other four are card shows. It's tremendous fun. I love sifting through cards and you could stay there forever if you wanted. One year his wife even asked if I wanted something to drink. I didn't get anything spectacular each year. Most of the cards were from 1985-95. But every once in awhile, I would hit a card from the '60s. And his inventory from the junk wax period was so complete, that you could always find the oddest of the oddba...

So what the hell is wrong with me? I start a post about the worst year of the junk wax era by displaying perhaps the era's finest moment in 1991 Stadium Club? That was kind of the same thought process I went through when Chris Olds, of Beckett fame, tweeted today that 1991 ranked among the worst baseball card years of all-time. To his credit, he did mention the exception of Stadium Club debuting that year. But I thought that SC would be enough to push 1991 ahead of other ungodly baseball card years, like, say, 1990. Olds dismissed my suggestion of 1990 being worse than 1991 by mentioning the number of star rookies to come out of 1990. Ah, rookies. Rookies never crossed my mind when I compared the two years. I've found that this rookie deal is a generational thing. When many collectors under the age of about 35 grade the quality of certain baseball card years, one of the main criteria is "who were the rookies that year?" But I'm over 40. I don't give...