Night Owl Cards

  My latest sportlots order is in and I went the "even I can afford that" route, which is mostly sportlots' reason for being.   Most of these were cheap upgrades and easy team set-fillers. There are a handful that don't fit easily into a compartment other than "cards I want."   I'm not going to show the upgrades other than the '70 Jesus Alou up top (replaces the one I have with tape on it) and the '76 Lopes Record-Breaker comparison:   The card on the left harks back to my collecting days in 1976. It's a nice keepsake but doesn't fit with my modern collecting standards. I've owned a cleaner copy in my '76 Topps set for quite awhile but another version for my Dodgers binder has not shown up at the house until now.   The other upgrades are related to the 1975 Topps set, specifically the minis. I will continue to upgrade '75 cards for as long as I'm collecting. Some of the minis I accepted just to get the set done so now it...

I've been out of town for the last few days, appreciating my first road trip of any kind in five months. Usually when I go away, I try to scope out some sort of card-opening scenario, a surprise card show perhaps, an antique shop, heck, even a Target run in an unfamiliar place is exciting. But seeing that the COVID era isn't ending any time soon, dropping in at any store or shop for card frivolity remains impossible for me, I don't care what you see from those video card-breakers raiding the aisles at Walmart. I haven't opened a pack of cards since an ill-advised Target run in mid-March. It hasn't been as difficult as I expected, but if you throw a four-month pack drought on top of going on a trip and leaving my cards far behind, that's when the withdrawal symptoms start to kick in and nobody wants to see night owl cranky and shaking while on vacation. Desperate times, man. And desperate measures, too. That's why you see a pack of 1992 Leaf, Ser...

I watched the "Jack of All Trades" baseball card documentary on Netflix yesterday. I didn't think I'd like it, but it turns out it was pretty good. It's far from perfect. But the complaints that "it isn't really a baseball card movie" are kind of pointless. Of course it isn't. Who could make money off of a movie that is about nothing but baseball cards? Anyway, it was interesting to look inside the hobby a little and to reminisce about that junk wax period that is now over 25 years old! One of the things mentioned repeatedly in the documentary is how everybody during that period was trying to get rich. Collectors, dealers, card companies. And one theory on how to do that back then was just to produce more . More of everything. More stores. More cards. More sets. Definitely more sets. It's 1992 now in the "Best Set of the Year" series and we're up to 12 sets that I have to analyze. I cried about having to review nine s...