Night Owl Cards

  The popular Twitter card question-and-answer feature, CardChat, put out a series of questions yesterday relating to buying cards, particularly in 2022. The last question was simple: show your favorite card purchase from this year.   I was stumped.   Any other year, it would've been the easiest question in the world to answer. But this year, so far, I have no answer.   Sure, I've bought cards I've liked, you've seen them on this blog for the last four months. But there's nothing that stands out as FAVORITE or something that other collectors would see and, say, "oh yeah, that's a great card."   A year ago at this time, I was buying 1956 Topps of superstars, any number of two dozen cards I purchased in the first four months of 2021 I could enter as my answer to my favorite card purchase and be sure about it.   But this year is different. Buying cards is different. If I want to buy vintage, I will more than likely have to pay something unreasonable, if I...

Every time I land some of these 1995 Topps Archives Brooklyn Dodgers cards, I think about how they would have been more amazing to me back in the year that they were issued. I was barely buying cards in '95. And the stage of my collection was not as advanced as it is now. Many of the cards in the '95 Archives set would have had a great deal of appeal because of that. Back then, the only original '50s Dodgers cards that I owned that are also replicated in this '95 set were the 1956 Carl Erskine and the 1956 Don Newcombe. So how cool would it be to have a card that looked like the 1955 Jackie Robinson or the 1953 Roy Campanella or the 1956 Sandy Koufax, even if they weren't the actual cards? Well, now I have the actual '55 Robinson and the actual '53 Campy and the actual '56 Koufax. And I have the original cards for darn near half of the 1995 Archives set if not more. So the appeal may be diminished -- I already have a 1955 Topps Sandy Koufax du...

I said several posts ago that now that I've completed the 2001 Upper Deck Decade '70s set that I'd conduct a full examination of the set that covered the time period when I first became aware of baseball, first watched games on TV and attended them in stadiums, and first collected baseball cards. I like this set a lot because of its colorful tribute to the '70s. It had to be something special to grab my attention during a period when I had no idea what was going on in card collecting. But, like I said a few times before, I spotted it while shopping for something else in a drug store and became fascinated with the cards. One of the things I find most interesting about them is that it is Upper Deck paying tribute to the '70s. That was amusing to me. It's still amusing to me. I always thought of Upper Deck as believing that baseball started when they put Ken Griffey Jr. on a card and that anything before that was not important. And if you look closely at t...