Night Owl Cards

  Are you amused like me when an ebay seller throws some extra cards in with you order and tries to guess your interests by what you ordered? It doesn't happen a lot for me. For whatever reason, very few of the people I order from add extra cards. But a recent shipment of four 1976 Hostess needs did.   Three of the cards I ordered happened to be White Sox.   I didn't plan it that way. Each was ordered for a very specific reason, but the White Sox uniform wasn't one of them. For Terry Forster, I was upgrading my previous version of the card. For Jorge Orta, it is a short-print in the set and I nab those as quickly as I find them. For Rich Gossage, he's one of the more expensive cards in the set, so let's get that out of the way. I know those three cards ordered together makes me look like a White Sox team collector to someone from the outside. But the closest I've come to having an interest in the White Sox is when they were the parent club for the Buffalo Bisons...

Each year I notice a malaise that settles over the blogging community during late August. I'm not sure why that is. My guess is vacations come into play. In some areas of the country school has started up (which still strikes me as bizarre). Perhaps some folks are a little tired of baseball -- their teams are fading, the NL playoff contenders are a collection of gross -- and they can't get interested in cards. This is usually the time of year when everyone fails to comment on one of my posts, a rarity as a post earlier this week was the first in almost two years without a comment. And yesterday I kind of opened my heart and the clicks were, well ... weak. But I knew all this. That is why I had planned to start The Greatest 100 Cards of the '80s countdown in August, specifically the end of August. Maybe I could generate some interest among bored collectors. However, life has conspired all summer to prevent that from happening and with everyone apparently too busy ...

After basically taking the year off from collecting in 1990, I was back in 1991. I collected a lot of stuff in 1991 -- because there was a lot to collect. They blew the barn doors off in 1991. Cards and collecting and hobby people in general would never be the same because of '91. There was no going back. The genie was out of the bottle. Everyone had an accountant. We were all going to be stinkin' rich. And the quickest way to retirement -- in 1991 -- was to buy even more cards. The card companies were there for you. There were no less than nine major card sets in 1991, the most ever. I'm not even counting things like Classic and O-Pee-Chee Premiere. Nine sets to collect. NINE! For the first six years of my collecting existence I was collecting one solitary set and sticking my fist in a cereal box for another. That was it. NINE! The '91 card season is probably most notable for the growth in "premium" sets. Leaf in 1990 spawned Stadium Club and Ult...

Some of you won't see this post for awhile because you're watching Game 1 of the NBA Finals. I don't watch the NBA unless I have to (i.e.: work), so I have the luxury of being able to blog while abnormally tall people drop a basketball into a hoop. Because I'm somewhat unaware of the NBA, it slipped past me that both finalists enjoy wearing yellow in their uniforms. It was brought to my attention by UniWatch's Paul Lukas, who wrote a column for ESPN earlier today on how much yellow there is in the finals of both the NBA and the NHL. I happened to notice it while watching Game 1 of the Stanley Cup Final on Monday. "Wow!" I thought, half cringing. "That's really too much yellow." Yellow just doesn't work for me. I like it in certain situations. Women in sun dresses, as a fast-food beacon, helping me find the mustard bottle, stuff like that. Heck, even my favorite baseball card of all-time is significantly yellow. But the color is ...

OK, I've delayed what I was going to write about so Fuji can hijack my blog again. But this is an idea  that I should have come up with myself, so I deserve to have my schedule shaken up a little. Fuji, channeling dayf , asks "what is the ugliest set you've ever seen?" Excellent. If there's one thing I know about, it is ugly. I am forever coming across wardrobe choices, pet preferences, automobile selections and, dare I say it, people that others think look perfectly fine. In fact, sometimes they say, "that is beautiful ." And I stand and stare in disbelief. "No it ain't, child," I say to myself. "That ugly." And so it is with baseball card sets (yep, strictly baseball here). Some folks have some strange ideas of what looks good on a rectangular piece of cardboard. And I was able to come up with 15 ugly-ass sets. (that's right, 15. You think I was going to give you only one? This is a full-service blog here). A...