Night Owl Cards

For the longest time, I associated the word "zapped!" with the R-rated teen comedy whose only objective was to see how many times it could show Heather Thomas' clothes popping off. As a teenager at the time of this movie's release, I had no problem with this. And the lousy movie gets entirely too much credit just because it showed up when I was 16. But while my teen years are now filed under "ancient history," and movies like this are no longer viewed as acceptable behavior, a new definition for "zapped" has emerged. And I would mourn the loss of my youth over this, except that this new definition involves receiving free baseball cards. Sorry Scott Baio and Willie Aames, you never existed. Once again, I am on the receiving end of a zippy zapping! Heather who? This is just one of the many fine cardboard pieces I received from Zippy Zappy, who runs Torren' Up Cards . ZZ's packages tend toward prospects, Asian cards and long-...

Ever since I was a budding collector, I have been ever-vigilant about preventing doubles from invading my collection. It's obsessive, I know. And at the rate that cards arrive in my mailbox, it is now also a little pointless. But, still, I can't shake the mind-set: filter the dupes, filter the dupes, filter the dupes. My Dodgers collection is rather advanced at this point so the routine that I go through every time a package arrives in the mail is pretty important. Upon opening the package, I shuffle through the cards and place cards I know I need in one stack and doubles in another, separating the wheat from the chaff if you want to get biblical about it. "Got it, got it, need it" will be a prevailing thought process as long as I'm collecting, and I've got this routine down cold. I'm pretty good at it, although I'm extra wary about any card from the mid-to-late '90s or early 2000s. So, I went through the ritual again in my first trade w...

Even though I don't kill my own dinner, drive a pickup with the tailpipe cut off to wake up every last person, or punctuate each sentence with "what-not," I'm your basic red-blooded American male. I like meat. I like girls. I like baseball. Most of my tastes are fairly basic and mainstream, especially when it comes to baseball. I follow the major leagues. And I'll go to a minor league game. Everything else, well, it just muddies the situation. I don't have time for it. I collect the same way -- in other words, baseball players I've heard of, please. But there are those who try to take me out of my comfort zone. Sometimes I go along for the ride, sometimes I hide under the covers until they go away. Recently, the operator of Torren' Up Cards , dropped another Zippy Zapping on me. As you know, ZZ likes cards that fly off my radar. Some I am aware of but generally ignore. Others I've heard of, but only because there are blogs like Torren...