Night Owl Cards

I was supposed to take at least two days off from this blog so I could travel in order to enjoy some more holiday merriment. However, I live in lake-effect snow country, which, every year means: "here comes a storm that we didn't know about even 12 hours ago and it's going to dump 3 inches to 3 feet on you depending on your 'locale' and, oh, by the way, if you're driving, you're F'd!" This is the message that travels across the bottom of your TV screen in lake-effect land, except they don't use "F'd," they use the actual word. ... or maybe that's just the vibe I get. So, we had to cut our merriment in half and I have returned safely to the home nest, and, lucky you, you get an extra blog post out of this affair -- I'm going to tell you how I got scammed over my Christmas vacation. Well, actually, my sister-in-law got scammed, but there's no way I'm telling her that. My sister-in-law bought a bunch of cards...

I'm not fully convinced that the reason that 2017 baseball cards have disappeared from the shelves of big box stores is solely Aaron Judge and Cody Bellinger. If you're paying attention, Archives, Bowman, Platinum, Stadium Club and Allen & Ginter aren't the only sets that have vanished very quickly. In my neck of the woods anyway, Gypsy Queen and Heritage made terribly hasty exits, too. So, the question is: Is Topps mandating a shortened shelf live on product to heighten demand? I have my doubts that this is the case. There is only so much Topps can control. And distribution is often out of Topps' grasp. I don't think distributors care anything about demand (or maybe they do, I'm not a distributor). But I just think it's interesting that cards almost across the board -- except for flagship -- have barely lasted even two weeks on store shelves. There aren't any more people in the card aisle with me than there was before (none and none), so ...

Like it or not, we card bloggers are stuck in an eternal cycle. If we want our collections and blogs to grow, there must be a rhythm to what we do. It goes a little like this: 1. Buy cards 2. Strike up a trade 3. Trade cards 4. Blog about cards from trade This is the card blog circle of life. Your blog has a better chance of thriving if those steps are included at least periodically. Of course, this also means that you will never not have something to do as it relates to cards. I've been blogging about cards for over five years now. And I think there may have been only three or four instances where either my "incoming" or "outgoing" bins were empty. Cards are always coming and going. Always. Back in the dewy-eyed days of the blog I used to set as a goal either getting all my card packages sent out or all of them blogged about and put away. But I've given up. It's never going to happen. It's an endless cycle. For instance, I receiv...

A couple of years ago, Topps came up with something called "cognac" parallels. A lot of us dubbed them " liquorfractors ," which was a much more appropriate name . The cards were pretty cool because although they never scanned well, they were a sight to see in person. Throw that card under a lamp and the light would bounce off the surface like an inebriated stained glass window. They were nice because although they didn't look like much just sitting there, they had a greater purpose. I'm pretty certain that this isn't the first time this reflective-glass technique has been used -- there were actual stained-glass-themed inserts in the '90s that reappeared again in this year's Archives -- and I'm sure it's been around since refractors were born. But the liquorfractors seemed to have spawned a recent trend of putting what look like shards of glass on the surface of your cards. Panini calls its Cooperstown parallels, like this o...

No, it's not Mariano Duncan. I just put that card there so the blog roll wouldn't give the title away. I'm sneaky like that. With the number of cards issued for everyone in baseball these days, it's pretty easy to obtain a sizable collection of your favorites. Although I wouldn't call myself a player-collector, my favorites happen to be Kershaw, Hershiser, Cey, Nomo, etc., and I have hundreds of cards for all those guys. I also have a decent collection of guys I don't care about at all. I have 16 cards of Jeremy Hermida. How that happened, I have no idea. I can barely tell you anything about him. I even had trouble typing his name out correctly just now. I have 36 cards of Todd Helton. He kills the Dodgers. What am I doing with that many cards of mountain man? I have 35 cards of both Milton Bradley and Ryan Braun. Hell, that's ugly. Even managers are relatively easy to obtain. I have nine cards for Whitey Herzog, 14 for Bobby Cox, 15 for Tony ...