Night Owl Cards

  While flipping through my 2010 Topps binder for yesterday's post I realized again that I have got to replace many of the pages in it. I don't know what happened to the pages in that thing. Somehow they are super brittle and they've come apart so easily it's as if they have a disease. None of my other pages are like this. And these are Ultra Pro pages, which I've always known as the sturdiest and the best quality. I'd expect it from cheaper pages that I often have to buy, or are gifted to me, but not these guys. The first few pages are in decent shape until we get to the page with numbers 127-135. You can see what I've called "stripping" or "shredding" above the Reid Gorecki card. That type of thing continues for a few pages as if the disease has spread from the pages closest to each other. The next page: After a few pages like that, the symptoms clear up for several clean pages. But it's not over yet. There is another grouping of cr...

The February/March edition of Beckett Vintage Collector should have arrived in subscribers' mailboxes by now and may or may not have reached magazine aisles at your favorite chain bookstore or supermarket (I don't know for sure because it takes me an hour to drive to somewhere with a magazine aisle). Inside that Vintage Collector is another article from me. It's my sixth one now. To think, at this time last year, I was celebrating my first. The article is about the 1980 Topps set, which was the final Topps flagship set issued during the Topps monopoly era. That was exactly 40 years ago, before the arrival of Donruss and Fleer the following year. Many collectors who didn't arrive upon the hobby scene until later in the 1980s or the 1990s seem to regard the monopoly era as a strange and unpleasant place. With abundant card options at their disposal for 40 years now, how could anyone live on just one card set a year? It honestly wasn't that bad. It was pr...

When you've been blogging as long as I have, collecting as long as I have, you come across milestones every year. For example, this year is the 45th anniversary of the first time I opened a pack of cards (1974 Topps). It's also the 10th anniversary of the first time I evaluated Topps flagship on this blog. That happened with the 2009 set. That means I have evaluated an entire decade of flagship. And therefore, I can rank the flagship sets from an entire span of 10 years -- 2010-19 -- which I will do for you now. The best part of this exercise is I can go back into the archives and find what I said when I was looking at the set for the first time ... because I've been doing this for 10 years. So, the rankings for Topps flagship from 2010-19: 10. 2016 This set will always be remembered as the first Topps flagship set without borders. That is not a point in its favor. However, I"m more disturbed by the way they went about the set. The "smoke" e...

The 10th anniversary giveaway has come to a close. But first I need to get rid of this 2010 Topps short-print of Cy Young. It's the last prize left and an interesting if I can say so myself. I mean look at those stats! And those teams ? The Spiders? The Perfectos? The AmeriCAINS?? (What the hell, Topps, it's supposed to be the Boston Americans ). This card is destined for Sport Card Collectors, if he wants it. He just has to let me know by 8 p.m. EST Monday. Otherwise it goes to Bru. Or Fuji after that. I will be sending out prize packages hopefully starting the end of this week. I can't send them all out at once. I don't have the time nor the money. Fortunately, Commish Bob of the Five-Tool Collector helped in the money department by donated nearly two-dozen stamps to the cause! Thank you very much! That is a big assist. Especially for someone who is paying for a kid in college. So I'll start sending out prize envelopes, starting with the first p...

I have collected cards for most of my life, more than 40 years, with a few breaks in between. Collecting is a way of life for me and is ingrained in my thoughts and actions. It is such a part of me that I don't even realize how big of a card nerd I have become. I am not the most knowledgeable collector around, far from it, but I do know a lot about cards. And because I've never been someone to give myself the benefit of the doubt, I just assume that everyone else knows about cards, at least a little. And if someone asks me about cards more than once, then, yeah, I'm assuming they know something about cards. But I was reminded yesterday that civilians -- yes, I'm calling non-collectors "civilians," that's how immersed I am -- don't know squat about cards. In the middle of a brutally long work day, I stopped at the post office to send off some card packages. I plopped six small mailers on the counter and the worker who is almost always there sta...

(Happy Babe Ruth Day. It was 69 years ago today that a dying Babe Ruth was honored with his own day at Yankee Stadium. Let's recognize that with a little Cardboard Appreciation. This is the 239th in a series): It's not like me to pay homage to a Yankee. But when a Yankee completes a set -- an insert set at that, a second insert set at that, then I must put allegiances aside and ... ack ... honor a Yankee. This particular card, which I received from Dennis at Too Many Verlanders just the other day (I'll show how he decimated my Nebulous 9 on another post), finishes off the More Tales of the Game insert set from 2010 Update, which was a continuation of the Tales of the Game insert set in the flagship set that year. This is one of my favorite insert series of the last five or six years, because I do love cards that tell a story. The set is a little too heavy on Yankees (imagine that, Topps overemphasizing the Yankees). But it does a good job of conveying the well-t...

Next week is a big one for card collectors. The first Topps baseball cards of the season are scheduled to arrive, and no matter how hardened and cynical you have become, this news will always produce a thrill in your cold, unfeeling bones. I already know that I will not be attempting to complete the set for a fifth straight year. But that won't stop me from taking more trips next week to Walmart and Target than I would normally make in an entire year. Every year, it's the same. I have to get my hands on the first few packs of the season. I'll do it again next week, or whenever the hell the cards finally arrive in this frozen tundra. But, regardless, I'm sure I'll do it again. And you'll do it again, too. We'll all do it again. This has been ritual for me for 40 years. With only a few exceptions in the late '90s and early 2000s, I've sought out packs at the start of the year, getting those first glimpses of cardboard goodness. To prepare myse...

I'm sure you've heard the old cliche that professional baseball players are men playing a boy's game. They're getting good money for it, too. The older I get, the more I wonder why I'm still paying attention to these guys, running around the field, swatting at a tiny horsehide ball, looking ridiculous in their lettered pajamas. Isn't this stuff for kids? Yet here I am, still captivated by both the game and another "kids' pursuit" -- baseball card collecting. All three of those aspects -- baseball, card collecting and kids -- have come together every few years in a Topps card set devoted to current ballplayers' childhood photos. They've arrived with different titles -- "Boyhood Photos of the Stars" or "When They Were Young" -- but each are the same: a large photo of the player as a kid, a small inset of the current player as he is now, and a write-up on the back about his childhood of playing baseball. However,...