Night Owl Cards

  Here's a fairly timely post. Yes, I've been watching the Olympics. It's partly my job and I'm so happy everything is happening six hours ahead of time. Makes things easier amid all the other obstacles I encounter these days when putting together an informative sports section. As I've said before, my favorite summer Olympic sports to watch are indoor volleyball (that beach thing has to go), track and field and archery. Track and field is the only one of those three NBC shows a lot, but I don't have the energy to deal with password hell to get on Peacock and see other sports. Maybe if baseball was actually in the Olympics I'd make the effort. But I like seeing the U.S. rack up gold medals no matter what the sport. And to stay with the theme, I've racked up another gold parallel team set. I wrote a post six months ago about trying to chase down gold parallels for Dodgers team sets for some of the recent Topps sets where I like what it did with the parall...

    This is post No. 5500 on the blog. Not that the number means all that much, unless you tell someone outside the hobby that you've written 5,500 blog posts about accumulating cards. That will probably draw some sort of reaction.   To them -- most of them anyway -- it's all just mindless accumulation. It's all stuff for the throw-out man eventually. But to me, and the people who read this -- this blog isn't FOR YOU, people who think cards are dumb -- every card added has meaning. It fits into a specific category that pays tribute to whatever thing -- baseball, player, year, hobby -- that means something to that collector.   There's probably no more appropriate time than to go through some recent pickups -- wildly unconnected -- that have been occupying space on my card desk for too long. Yeah it's another show-off post. I'm 5500 posts in now, I can't change.   This will illustrate exactly how many kinds of cards I think are important and also that I ...

  Almost 15 years ago, Topps started doing something to its flagship set that was reviled by set-collectors at the time. In the 2009 flagship set, it inserted short-prints of legendary players throughout the base set. Those short-printed cards shared a card number with a regular non-short-printed card of a current player. For example, at card No. 320, Miguel Cabrera shares a card number with the short-printed Johnny Mize. Topps had tinkered with SPs in the base set in preceding years and it was all quite controversial. Set collectors at the time -- myself included -- thought adding exclusive cards to the set pursuit was unfair and making the quest to "collect them all" too difficult or plain impossible. Years later, Topps has continued the practice in almost every flagship set since (although have you noticed there aren't any SPs listed in 2023 flagship so far on TCDB?). They are so common now that even people who fumed over those short-prints, like me, don't even pay...

Next week is a big one for card collectors. The first Topps baseball cards of the season are scheduled to arrive, and no matter how hardened and cynical you have become, this news will always produce a thrill in your cold, unfeeling bones. I already know that I will not be attempting to complete the set for a fifth straight year. But that won't stop me from taking more trips next week to Walmart and Target than I would normally make in an entire year. Every year, it's the same. I have to get my hands on the first few packs of the season. I'll do it again next week, or whenever the hell the cards finally arrive in this frozen tundra. But, regardless, I'm sure I'll do it again. And you'll do it again, too. We'll all do it again. This has been ritual for me for 40 years. With only a few exceptions in the late '90s and early 2000s, I've sought out packs at the start of the year, getting those first glimpses of cardboard goodness. To prepare myse...

A few posts ago, I showed some pictures of "the card room" in my home. It's your typical assortment of card stacks, boxes and binders, binders everywhere. I mentioned in that post that I stack binders on top of each other because I read somewhere that storing binders vertically can warp pages and then warp your cards. But stacking comes with a cost, especially if you're trying to cut corners. I have a lot of card interests and consequently a lot of cards. But I don't have the money or the space for all those binders. So I do two things that I know will cause several collectors to shake their heads. First, I double-bag my pages -- 18 cards per page. I have done this since I first knew there were binders and pages to store cards. I've done this for so long that leaving nine cards to a page to this day seems extravagant. Almost wasteful. The only set that I have not done this for is the 1956 Topps set, because the card backs are so fantastic. If I w...

I bought a Fairfield repack rack pack a couple of weeks ago and this card fell out. My first thought was "I have this card already." My second thought was, "hey, this is a night card. I can put it in the binder." I didn't even think of the most obvious thing about the card. It was of an Oakland A. I like repacks a lot. I usually stick with the rack pack variety. They're good fun, especially now, when I'm not interested in current cards. But I have noticed one thing peculiar about them, outside of all of the unholy love for the 1990 Kmart set. They are filled with Oakland A's. Have you noticed this, too? I'll admit I'm hoping my biases aren't swaying my perception here. First, the cards I have shown and the cards where I most notice the Oakland A's are all from between 2002-05, a black hole in my collecting timeline and a reason why I buy rack packs, to find cards from this time period. Second, I tend to accumulate ...

Today is the day to talk about shadows. Did the groundhog see his shadow? (Punxsutawney Phil did not ). Will there be six more weeks of winter or an early spring? Only the shadow knows. Baseball is the season to talk about shadows. More than any other major sport, shadows are a factor. Outfielders struggle with them. Batters fear them. TV commentators complain about them even though the network scheduled the game for a time when shadows would wreak the greatest havoc. But what about shadows on baseball cards? Do we care about shadows on baseball cards? Well, I do. I write about it all the time. When I was first collecting baseball cards -- in the mid-to-late 1970s -- shadows were a way of life on baseball cards. Topps had just started experimenting with action photos on its cards in the early '70s, and was quickly finding out how difficult it was to get a clear shot of someone from that far away -- while the sun was shining. Unlike the portrait shots of the 1950s an...