Night Owl Cards

By 1993, even dumb ol' me was waking up to the idea that the old collecting model wasn't going to work anymore. I couldn't possibly collect everything that was on store shelves at this rate. The objective every year since I started in 1975 -- find wax packs at stores, buy them -- was a solid purchasing model for years and years. But by the late 1980s, I couldn't keep up with all the sets out there and a lot of times I didn't care, and even in the years when I did try to buy them all, say 1991 and 1992, I was reaching the realization that this was stupid. So, in '93, I went into the collecting season with my eyes wide open. I would collect only what I knew or what appealed to me. And this is how the year went: Find Topps, buy Topps. Find Fleer, buy a little bit but I didn't really like it. Find Donruss, buy a little bit but I didn't really like that either. Find Score -- but it wasn't easy -- and buy it. Find Upper Deck and ... Holy smoke...

All right, I'm already regretting the title to this post, and I'm still not happy that I'm going through with writing this at all. But my job on this blog is to document my collecting journey, and this is a part of that. Just know that this is a small, small, small inconvenience in what is a wonderful asset to the hobby. Teamsets4u.com  made my want lists what they are today. I haven't even accessed the site fully -- I know there are many other sets listed there that I need to add to my want lists. But if you scroll through the entire page of my want lists, it will take you a little while anyway. I owe that to teamsets4u. It is an invaluable resource for team collectors. Every set painstakingly separated by team. It's an amazing undertaking. All that patience, all that time. I find periodic errors, which are perfectly understandable given the massive number of sets issued through the years, especially since the early 1990s. There is no way you couldn...

All right. I am absolutely certain that this card is a night card. There can be no dispute. We have the lights on. We have the dark sky. We have Jerald Clark bathed in illuminosity. We're batting 1.000. I bring this up for two reasons. First, two bloggers have sent me this particular card over the last few months. I do enjoy it when another blogger actually makes the effort to track down a night card, and there is no question that this is a beauty. The second reason I bring it up is because there seems to be some question as to whether the card below is a night card. Motherscratcher sent this card to me because he thought it was a night card. Two other people commented on the previous post that they thought it was a night card, too. I, on the other hand, am not so sure. I'm saying that it's not a night card, although there's not a lot of confidence behind that statement. The reason I say it's not is because the bank of lights is turned off. Also, the sky looks da...