Night Owl Cards

  For the second straight year, and the fourth time in five years, the Dodgers have reached the League Championship Series.   Many fans -- I have been made very aware -- don't like this. But that comes with the territory when as a fan you're part of an exclusive club for more than one or two years in a row. The Dodgers are the villain.   I know that relatively few on social media will be rooting for the Dodgers. (A lot are rooting for a World Series between the Mariners-Brewers, who are practically the same team). I have tried to add known Dodgers fans to my following list in hopes of balancing out the anti-Dodger content, but the best-case scenario is to avoid social media as much as possible. We'll see how that goes. Social media is great for getting immediate info on plays during the course of a game, nothing else compares.   A lot of the people who comment on this blog aren't part of social media sites, so I'll move on to the card part of the post.   The two...

Topps loves to rehash its old designs and it knows faithful collectors like me will eat it up because they grew up with Topps and they love the old designs (better than the new designs). But I will eat only so much. I know when I'm full (kind of). Topps is forever riffing off its old designs in Archives and insert cards like the one above, sent to me by Cards On Cards recently, and yes, there is a blue-bordered parallel of this '85 Koufax on COMC right now. Even though I adore colored-border parallels, I'll take my reverence only so far. Much of what Archives produces and those inserts yield, I can take or leave. But when it comes to Heritage, and doing border stuff with old designs, that's when it gets serious. I started to become aware of Heritage creating colored border parallels in 2011. The black-border parallels were part of retail blister packs and they were all the rage. Although Heritage chrome black borders were a thing prior to 2011, the 2011...

It's November, so I've begun transitioning 2019 cards to their ... um ... final resting place. That means taking them from the stacks of 2019 cards that have built up on my card desk since last winter and moving them to boxes or binders. Spoiler alert: only sets that I particularly enjoy get the binder treatment and none of the 2019 cards will see the inside of a binder. I always start with 2019 cards that I know I will not purchase again in a moment of weakness in the retail aisle. And, sadly, because I do love the brand, Heritage is getting that box treatment right now. While inventorying what I have of '19 Heritage, I discovered something that I hadn't noticed, nor had read anyone mentioning: 2019 Heritage marks the return of full names on the backs of Heritage cards. Topps has displayed the full names of players on the backs of their cards during two distinct periods: 1952-57 and then the early 1970s -- 1970, and after a two-year break, 1973-75. That me...

Adult life is all about demands on your time. That's all it is, scrambling from one thing to the next, forgetting important dates or tasks or interests because your brain has run out of room. I've been dealing with it for years and complaining about it on the blog for a long time, too. But I didn't know anything until I reached 2019. Ever since my parents' passings, I've been attempting to catch up. There's still plenty of aftermath to handle, nowadays it's all about finances. I just got a call on a financial matter because I haven't tended to something basically because I've had no time. At the moment of that call, I felt like I was being pulled in 100 different directions. I even feel like I'm being pulled in too many directions with my collection, too. With all of my interests, I find it difficult to focus when I have a little cash. Recently I used a portion of my payment from my latest Beckett Vintage Collector article to hit up COMC...