Night Owl Cards

  I picked up this card on Friday. Ryne Sandberg passed away Monday.   I was not a kid when Sandberg was starring for the Cubs. I was a senior in high school when his rookie card showed up, and I'm pretty sure I didn't know who he was when I pulled it. That was the last year of dedicated card collecting for me for the next six years. That's a lot of Sandberg cards I didn't see.   I'm also not a Cubs fan, and it feels odd writing a tribute. So I'm going to wander through topics while discussing Sandberg cards, too.   The Sandberg diecut card came from a collection I am assessing for a co-worker. She helps run a thrift shop through her church. The cards are the former collection of her neighbor. The collector's mom made the cards, and everything else in their garage, available to the shop.   It's apparent that the kid collected somewhere around 2005-15. There are also cards going back to 2001 (and some football cards from the late '80s but that was bef...

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...

Five years ago, I wrote a post titled "Five Years is a Long Time," in which I updated readers on the vast changes in players' careers in a five-year period. It was a bit surprising to see the results and the post drew a lot of comments. Well, five more years have passed since that post. Crazy, I know. And the set that was just coming out when I wrote that post -- 2011 Topps flagship -- is now going to kindergarten. I figured another comparison post was in order. But I don't have the time I had five years ago, so I won't be calculating like I did the last time. This time, I dug out all of the cards with the rookie card logo that I have from that flagship set (the set isn't complete) and briefly reviewed how those players have progressed since. See, this way I get to bash the rookie card logo while working on the post. It's double the entertainment! The most notable rookie-card logo player from that set that I own -- as of this moment right now...

I know what you're saying: "What? A full set of 1987 Topps and 868 1992 Upper Deck Eric Karros cards isn't the good stuff?" And while the above two things make for excellent blog posting, it is not what excited me about the second box that Rob sent me. It was all of the other things in the box. Among those things were a game program from an August 2015 Dodgers game, a Dodger pennant and Cooperstown pennant, another stack of penny sleeves and more library books. Here are some books that will keep me reading for the next 10 years (that's how often I pick up a book these days): The Dodgers media guide from their last championship season. I love media guides. I'm partly convinced that I became a sports journalist just because you get free media guides. Of course, now teams don't make media guides, or they make an online media guide, which isn't really a media guide at all but go ahead and pretend its real, and all of the perks of being a spor...