Night Owl Cards

(Greetings on one of the busiest travel weekends of the year. I tried traveling this weekend about 20 years ago. It was awful. I vowed never to do it again. And I haven't. It's time for Cardboard Appreciation. From the comfort of my home. This is the 306th in a series):   When I last visited this card, I was showing off the 868 versions of it that I had received from Dodgers fan and former 1992 Upper Deck Eric Karros hoarder, Rob . I haven't thought about the card, or how many copies of it that I still own, all that much in the last six years. I did give away a handful not long after receiving them. But the vast majority have been sitting in a couple of long boxes (one won't do the trick) in a closet for all of these years. However, I took them out last week when someone on Twitter asked "what's the most of a single card that you own?" I've met a lot of card hoarders in my time online and I expected a bunch of people to show off entire binders of the...

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...

I've got myself another little recurring series here. It's another one of those time-savers that requires minimal thought. In other words, it's almost a Tumblr post. (Remember my Tumblr page? It was a good idea until I realized the format doesn't think fondly of words and that was the end for me. This also means never expect to find Night Owl Cards on Instagram). I'm calling it "well, lookie there." It's what one might say as they're going through their collection and spotting something interesting that they are discovering for the first time. ... OK, it's what I might say as I'm going through my collection and spotting something interesting for the first time. The posts in this series after this one will feature some sort of name or title after the "well, lookie there," intro, at which point I expect readership to plummet dramatically for this particular series. That's usually how it goes. The debut entry has to do w...

Back when bipping was all the rage, I got bipped about seven or eight times. The most of one single card I received was 64 1990 Donruss Diamond King Bryn Smith cards. At the time, that was considered epic . Ha, ha, who in their right mind collected 64 of the same card of Bryn Smith? People couldn't get over it. But that was the tail end of bipping. For the most part, peace settled over the card land and has reigned for the last five years or so. If you see a bipping nowadays it's quickly snuffed out and reported to authorities. We are living in a society here. This is pretty much understood by everyone who operates a card blog or reads one. We have made progress. We have evolved. We moved on from bipping to bitching about squirrels on cards, to bitching about online exclusives, to tweeting about trades, to tweeting about fake digital cards of Star Wars characters. This is evolution, everyone! We can't go back! So, please tell me what the hell is this: I am n...

This is one of my wallet cards. If you look very closely, you can see Mickey Hatcher blinking as his eyes adjust to the daylight. He's been kept in a dark place for a long time. That dark place is my wallet. This card and my other wallet card just sit there as I sit there, with no place to go. When the wallet card game started, I was filled with enthusiasm, but it soon became obvious that I'm not equipped for this game. My wallet card doesn't go anywhere so I can't photograph him in interesting places, because I don't go anywhere. I don't travel for my job anymore and I certainly don't travel for the heck of it because there's no time/money. And when I do go to a restaurant or a movie or the park, I never think to take out wallet card and snap his picture. So what am I doing playing this game? Wallet card hides in deepest darkest corner of the spacious (re: empty) billfold when I page through what Junior Junkie is doing with his Griffey wa...

I don't have much to say after yesterday's Archives diatribe, so let's play a game of "Better Going Than Coming". This is a game I play sometimes with my Upper Deck cards. Only Upper Deck cards will do, and the earlier the Upper Deck brand, the better. As you know, Upper Deck burst upon the scene with several innovations, but the most notable one for me was the fact that there was a large color photo on both the front and the back of the card. Wow. Periodically, I'd look at the photo used on the back of the card -- which was smaller, because UD had to squeeze in those infernal stats onto the back, too -- and wonder why the back photo wasn't the one on the front of the card. The card looked better going than coming! (By the way, the back of the Trammell card isn't much better than the front, and '89 Upper Deck had photos that are as dark as anything Donruss put out -- I never could figure out why nobody ever mentioned that). So let'...