Night Owl Cards

  I continue to add my card inventory to the Trading Card Database site. Nothing quite underlines the fact you have too many cards like this process. I'm probably a little more than halfway through, 60 percent perhaps, and there's still so much more to cover. It leaves a lot of time for thinking as you're checking box after TCDB box. And one of the things that I was thinking about yesterday is how not every team collector's experience is the same. This is not a sudden realization, for anyone. I've long known that a person who collects Dodgers or Yankees or Red Sox is not going to have the same collecting experience as someone who collects Brewers or Diamondbacks. This is not 1979 when Topps was the only game in town and there was basically one set to chase and the teams received pretty much the same allotment of cards. Since the '90s, and probably with boxed sets before that, team distribution has been all out of whack. Some teams get a lot of cards, some get ve...

It's no secret that collation for trading card sets sucks and has basically sucked for the last 25 years. I believe I've mentioned this before, but I don't remember pulling two of the same card in the same pack until Upper Deck came along. So I've been blaming them for turning a periodic frustration into an expected occurrence for the last few decades. I am so used to the collation issues of just about every product on the market that I have certain expectations when I buy packs. For example, if I already own a fair amount of a certain set -- and by "fair amount" I mean at least 30 percent -- then when I buy a pack of that product, I expect a certain amount of duplicates. That shouldn't be so, but that's what I expect. This has played out so often for me over the years as I have one-third finished sets everywhere, particularly from the last two or three years. Yesterday, I stopped at Walmart because I had spotted on the Twitter that there we...

A Topps coupon for cents off on a Heritage blaster still resides in my pocket. I'm making fewer and fewer trips to Target these days because pulling Diamondbacks and Marlins is really getting annoying. I've finally become disciplined enough to focus any extra cash on a COMC purchase rather then taking my chances on a pack rip. Does this mean I'm done with pack-ripping for good? Absolutely not. It wouldn't be the hobby without it. I'm just reining it in more. Besides the whole "getting exactly what I want" thing, an online purchase helps me obtain something else I can't get at the card aisle. Online exclusives. Yes, I know how annoying online exclusives are. You really try to put them out of your head and treat them like they're not even cards. I feel ya. I do the same thing. But sometimes, there's some card that's just too appealing, and before you even know it's an online exclusive, it's in your cart and you've stuff...

1995. I can't say I remember a lot about that year. Hmmm, let's see what I can dig out of my brain: Well, there was the O.J. trial, of course. Michael Jordan came back to the NBA. We had a World Series for the first time in two years (and a former co-worker, whose big passion was sailing for crying out loud, scoffed as we watched the Braves play the Indians, saying "people still watch this stuff?" Yeah, buddy, they do. Go fall out of a boat). Blues Traveler was big. Toy Story, too, if you were a kid then. There was living in a gangsta's paradise. The Soup Nazi episode on Seinfeld. (Also another favorite: "Jimmy might have a compound fracture! Jimmy's going into shock!"). More stuff: The emergence of Donovan McNabb. Apollo 13. The world is a vampire. OK, I guess I do remember some things. As far as baseball cards, the hobby was almost dead. In my world and just about everywhere else. The strike had practically killed it. I bought three ...

I've used the term "digital cards" in the past. I've decided I'm not going to do that anymore. Because there is the phrase "digital cards," Topps has now come up with the term "physical cards" to describe, you know, actual cardboard cards . That is too weird. People don't play a video football game and then play a game in the park and call it "physical football" (unless the game gets physical). I'd hate to see where that would lead. ("I took my physical dog for a walk in the physical park where he physically pooped on some physical grass."). Those pieces of cardboard you can touch, scuff and ding are simply cards. No adjective needed. And those "cards" that you see on your phone are images of cards. Sure, they're collectible. I won't argue that point. Collect all the images you want. But you're collecting images of cards. The cards I can touch without a screen between me and my fingers ar...