Night Owl Cards

I entered one of Sports Card Info's many card contests a couple of weeks ago. Andrew's been holding these giveaways for probably as long as I've been blogging, but I rarely enter. Plus, it's one of those deals where if you comment on the post every day, you have a better chance of winning, and I never remember to comment more than once. My forgetfulness didn't matter this time though and I won the above Alex Verdugo "player-worn memorabilia" card! My enthusiasm aside, I think we're all past relic cards these days. The peak era for relics probably ended almost 10 years ago, and ever since we've been accumulating them absent-mindedly, knowing that they're probably not legitimate, a victim of our habits and nostalgia and ... I don't know, a difficult-to-shake fondness for laundry bits, I guess. I never go out of my way to obtain a relic card. Even when they were "the shit," as the kids-who-are-now-adults say, they were ne...

Score was my kind of card company. Sure, I've always been a Topps fan, and Fleer is right up there, too. Score didn't do everything right (looking squarely at '92), but during that baseball card paradigm shift of the late 1980s, I was definitely part of Team Score. Collectors aligned themselves into two camps at that time -- well, they would have if the internet was around in 1989 anyway. I'm told we're all so damn divided these days. But as we collectors went about our business by our lonesome back then, some of us gravitated to Upper Deck and some of us gravitated to Score. I felt the pull of Score, although I admit I didn't even see Upper Deck for at least the entire 1989 collecting season if not longer. But Score appealed to me immediately. It was colorful, it was action-packed and it was informative. It produced the "thinking collector's" card. Turn over that card and Score could give you a thorough rundown of Thomas Howard's prog...

Those of you who frequent the card aisle at the two main big box stores that sell cards probably know about the bottom shelf. At both stores, the bottom shelf is usually reserved for things like binders and pages or sometimes big boxes of cards (complete sets, for instance). This is also where you can find discounted cards, which almost always are filled with nothing but football or basketball unless you get really lucky. With the exception of an impulse search of the discount area, I usually ignore the bottom shelf. Merchants aren't going to put anything that I want down there anyway. They especially aren't going to put loose packs down there -- where little kids can get their grubby hands on them -- and that's what I was looking for this afternoon. I was actually at Target to get a few decorative items for the card room. I'm still waiting on some drawers to house my card packaging materials, which will officially complete my room. So in the meantime, I look...