Night Owl Cards

  I resolved to do this post about a month ago when Dime Boxes listed some of what he considers the worst of the junk wax era. I ranked my least favorite from this time way back in the blog's early days, so this time I wanted to list what my favorites from 1987-93 are. You probably already know most of them -- I'm not exactly quiet on my card favorites -- but this post is also to counter all the praise for traditional favorites like 1987 Topps and 1989 Upper Deck. I can be contrarian and those two sets were never my favorites when I was buying packs during that time. (Didn't even see '89 UD).   So I'm listing seven of my faves for posterity. Why seven? Because I consider the junk wax era to have lasted seven years, 1987-93. I can't comfortably squeeze 1986 and 1994 into that span, based on my experience of that time. Here is a very quick run through. 1. 1993 Upper Deck: You should know this by now. I'm writing a blog about it and everything . I don't kn...

    I forced myself to go to Walmart earlier today because they have the right-size mailing envelopes I need and then they didn't have them and I immediately became annoyed I was there and in a fit of self-loathing for such a stupid decision I walked to the card kiosk thing. The first thing I noticed was 2023 Bowman was out. There were blasters. But I don't buy stuff like that anymore. Outside of Bowman I saw blasters of 2022 Heritage High Numbers and Allen & Ginter and Panini Mosaic. Also fat packs of Optic and Topps team sets for just these teams: Orioles, Nationals, Red Sox, Braves and Cardinals. Come on, find me a Nationals fan here. There was also plenty of 2023 Topps Series 1, but I'm all done buying that. It did remind me though that I need to write a Define The Design post on the set as I try to do every year for flagship. 2023 flagship is fairly easy to name. That graphic treatment at the bottom is totally inspired by today's ballpark video scoreboards. Her...

  Unbeknownst to many of you, the 1993 Upper Deck set blog debuted this morning. If you could be so kind to put it on your reading lists and blog rolls (if you can, that is, I'm having issues posting it to my own blog roll). I am aware that set blogs are rather out-of-fashion. Heck, card blogging in general is. The set blog is pretty much what kicked off the card blogging boom, particularly the 1988 Topps blog . I know it's one of the first blogs I ever read, along with The Baseball Card Blog and Cardboard Junkie. So we're talking ancient territory in internet terms. But as a set-builder, I admire immensely the appreciation of each card and can't think of a better way to demonstrate that but through a post about each and every one. You will find no other medium that does that better, nothing on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube or Instagram. Because fewer people understand that kind of treatment, this set blog will be different than my other ones (Yup, this will be my fourth ...

  Just a quick blog post tonight because every school team in the country must play a "big game" today.   I know I mentioned that I will be starting up a 1993 Upper Deck set blog at some point, perhaps in 2022, perhaps during the 30th anniversary of the set in 2023. But I buried the news at the bottom of a recent post and maybe some didn't catch it.   I don't have a lot of planning to do for when I do start the blog. I've written three set blogs now so I know the routine, just have to switch it up a little so it's not exactly like the others. I also have the whole '93 set so I don't have to chase down any last-minute cards.   However, this set has something that the other sets I've written a blog about didn't -- inserts.   What to do with the inserts?   I don't have all of them, just a few. When I bought packs of the cards in '93, I didn't have much of an idea that inserts existed. I know I pulled a couple of cards that didn't l...

A commenter on yesterday's post was interested in seeing how I sort my 29 Dodgers binders. This is an odd time for me to do this since TCDB is making me question my sorting abilities. I mean look at this display here. This is a picture of my Dodgers binders from the 1920s/30s to around 2012. Obviously, I'm not finicky about how I display things. That one binder with the tape all over it is barely intact (I desperately need about 5 new binders) and unlike folks I have seen on this very blogosphere with every binder the same color and size with perfectly printed dates on each spine, there is none of that there. Just a mish-mash with binders facing this way and that (I get paranoid about cards warping) and no effort at all to get any of them to look alike (who has the time?) But it's not like I'm giving tours of the place, so if it doesn't bother me, it's perfectly fine. The cards inside is what is important and those are sorted a little bit better than the outside...

    When I wrapped up my last set blog more than two years ago, I figured that would be the end for me and set blogs. I had completed three of them at that point: 1975, 1971 and 1985. All Topps blogs. The second two, 1971 and 1985, I basically wrote at the same time and it was a bit grueling doing those and Night Owl Cards. I was worn out by May of 2019. Also, at that point, it seemed like set blogs were long past their freshness date. Chronicling a set was the cool blog thing to do back in 2008. But as the cool kids moved on to other things, only the hard-core set-appreciators were left and there aren't many of them anymore. Still ... I left open the possibility of writing another one when I finished off the last two. And just a couple days ago a complimentary comment left at the end of my 1985 Topps made me wonder. "Your blogs are great," it said. "I'd love to see a '73 or '74 version." Now, I'm not going to do something every time someone says...