Night Owl Cards

  Fans have returned to the stands this season, but it still looks a little empty up there. I don't know what the vantage point is in person, but watching on TV there seems to be a lot of room to roam. Room enough to perhaps play baseball in the stands. Like they did about 15 years ago. You don't remember that? Well, when would Topps not tell the truth? There it is right on your baseball card. A player preparing to take his swings in the stands. This was a common occurrence on Topps cards between 2005-08. And seeing what you can convince card collectors do these days ("seal your card in plastic forever," "buy this one-of-a-kind digital picture of a card"), I probably could convince someone that MLB was playing baseball in the stands based on just a few cards from this time period. Pitchers threw in the stands, sailing throws that knocked the nachos out of spectators' hands.   They scooped up hot grounders. You should have seen those fans scramble.       ...

I hope nobody minds that I'm moving a giant package that I received from Adam of ARPSmith's Sportscard Obsession up in the rotation. I try to show card packages in the order that I get them, and this big ol' box just arrived the other day. My daughter brought it in while searching the mailbox for college textbooks (poor dear) and said, "this is heavy!" But the stuff in here is so cool, I just had to get to it right away. I promise I won't forget anybody else's cards. As you might know, Adam purchased a huge collection from a collector and it's staged a coup in his basement. He needs to rid himself of some of the cards so he can, you know, move around in his home. There was so much variety in what Adam had to offer that I was bound to find something I wanted, and I did. Adam sent me a bunch of early '80s non-Topps needs, specifically 1981 Fleer, 1982 Donruss and 1983 Fleer. Also, since I'm always intrigued by Topps sets from when I w...

It's the postseason. Here is hoping that a Dodger is lifting his right arm victoriously while he trots toward first base at some point in this agonizing NLCS. (How come it's never the left arm?) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Night card binder candidates: Alex Gonzalez, 2004 Topps, #730; David Freese, 2012 Topps Heritage, #147; Mike Napoli, 2012 Heritage, #146; Kirk Gibson, 1989 Upper Deck, #666 Do they make the binder?: Gibson's a former Awesome Night Card subject and already in the binder. And the other three cards join him.

The end of work tonight (or last night for most of you) was a frustrating lesson in what happens when incompetence mixes with unnecessarily complicated technology: Everyone within a 500-foot radius will pay. So, with much relief and clinging to a few shreds of sanity, I came home eager to tend to my family of blogs. Unfortunately, this is the only one that will receive attention. Because my scanner -- my evil, evil scanner -- is trying to finish me off. I mean it is really, really putting a lot of energy into my demise. For example: I have just completed scanning the following image ... ... for the 16th time. Yup, 16 times. Why would I ever scan the same thing 16 times? I have no rational explanation. I just like things to be straight. It's a simple request by my way of thinking. Place an object on the scanner. Line it up in a reasonably straight fashion. And, presto, it should emerge on my backlit screen STRAIGHT! But my scanner won't do this. Bec...

(You have reached the end of Cardboard Appreciation Week. I hope you have enjoyed the variety of cards displayed in the past week. I tried to mix them up as there are so many different cards worth honoring. And, here for one last time -- until next week -- is Cardboard Appreciation. This is the 153rd in a series): Wow ... another card with a monstrous title. I've got to keep my collecting to pre-1990s issues. Unfortunately, that's not going to happen anytime soon. Because I am adding another insert series to my addiction. I used to steer clear of insert series. They didn't interest me (most of them still don't) and I viewed them simply as a money grab by card companies (I still do). But I've lightened up a little bit, probably because Topps has found my weaknesses. First it came out with tales of the game , and then it came out with glow-in-the-dark night cards , and then it came out with '75-style minis . And now I'm so addicted to certain insert...

I have been offering this particular item up for whatever late 1950s Dodger card I can find on the Million Card Giveaway site. I'm hoping it will land me something from 1959, a great year in Dodger history. At the very least, I'm hoping that the people I've made offers to don't out-and-out ignore me. That is very annoying. How can you have redeemed a late '50s Dodger card and not pay attention to the MCG site at least periodically? Or is it really that difficult to hit the "decline" button? Anyway, I've got to at least try with this card as it's the oldest one I've redeemed. This will be one of my final acts on the MCG site. I have left a few older cards, like Georgey boy, in my portfolio in hopes that they will entice someone to trade me something that I like more. Then my very last act will be to order shipment of those final cards before the March deadline. I'll probably do that in January, before the 2011 cards hit shelves. Me...

I am squeezing this post in between work craziness. It is one of the busiest weekends of the year, only surpassed by the insanity of March. It's the type of weekend where you go to work on your day off. ... twice. Today, it's an all-day and all-night affair. Tomorrow, it's much of the same. So, I picked something easy for tonight. Here it is: The Arizona Diamondbacks haven't been around very long. It's too long, if you ask me. But they make for a quick post. The interesting thing about the colors that the Diamondbacks wear is they have already changed their color scheme, even though they've been around for only 12 years. I consider that a sign of weakness. NBA teams do that. Some NHL and NFL teams, too. But if you want to be taken seriously in baseball, pick your colors and defend them to the death. Because of Arizona's switcheroo, poor Topps had to change the colors it used with Diamondbacks cards in the middle of the set in 2007. That might be t...

2004. The year Facebook started, the year the Red Sox ditched that 1918 monkey, and the year Ron Artest went into the stands just to say hello to a few fans. 2004 also marked my return to collecting baseball cards. I hadn't purchased more than two or three packs in a single year since 1994. But in 2004, I came across a few people who collected and that spurred me on to try to complete the sets that I collected when I was a kid. That's where most of my collecting effort went in 2004. I didn't pay attention to modern stuff much. But like I had done the previous four years, I grabbed a couple of packs just to see what "this year's cards" looked like. "Hmmm," I said. "White borders." Topps hadn't created a flagship set with white borders since 1997. It looked good. Even if the borders were super thick, which made room for the photo rather small (and the images even smaller). But this isn't the "card front countdown....

I've been out of town the last few days and finally return Saturday afternoon. For the first time since I began the blog, I wrote regularly scheduled posts for the days that I was gone. It worked relatively well. I'm not crazy about writing in advance when I don't know what's going to happen. It tends to make some of the posts a little stale. While I was gone, I tried to stay updated on all of your blogs via my cell, which is quite the frustrating experience at times. I don't know how you regulars do it. But then my battery died and I completely missed anything that happened Friday. Edwin Jackson's eight-walk no-hitter was news to me until about 2 p.m. Saturday. I didn't know about Carlos Zambrano's meltdown until about an hour after that. But the oldest bit of news that I knew nothing of until Saturday was the 11-hour match victory by American John Isner at Wimbledon. How on earth did no one mention that on their blog? ELEVEN HOURS! Perhaps I missed ...