Night Owl Cards

  I was looking at a football card on one of the online shopping sites the other day. It wasn't anything I sought out, it just caught my eye. As often happens with football cards, I didn't know the set and I didn't know the player (I don't remember what card it was now). But I was curious about him and I quickly looked for what position he played. But there was no position listed on the front. That annoyed me (it doesn't take much). It's been a long time since I've written about positions on the front of baseball cards and I touched on this once awhile ago , so I figured it was time for another one. Let's do a little examination of sets that have not put the position on the front of their cards.   This will mostly cover Topps because as often happens with these historical card reviews, I get to the 1990s and it's just a mess and would take an army of spreadsheets to sort out, and, guys, I still have a full-time job.   But I will mention that Bowman p...

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...

This fine night card is a definite candidate for the night card binder, for a lot of reasons. One of them is that Sean Doolittle is that very rare case in an Oakland A's uniform: He's managed to stay with the team for five years. I don't know how he's escaped the spinning revolving trade door outside the A's front office. I might be wrong, but I think he and Eric Sogard have lasted the longest from the current team, and Sogard has been disabled the whole year. (Coco Crisp was there for six years before he was traded to the Indians last month). Why here Doolittle is in the 2013 set after his first season with Oakland. I thought I'd do a little experiment and see where the rest of the A's from this set are. Brett Anderson: With the Dodgers (disabled) Other teams since the A's: Rockies Grant Balfour: Retired Other teams since the A's: Rays Bartolo Colon: Mets Other teams since the A's: none Ryan Cook: Mariner...

A couple of years ago, Topps decided to number the first few cards of its flagship set according to the uniform numbers of the players. Anthony Rizzo wore No. 44 so his card number was 44, Andre Ethier wore No. 16 so his card number was 16, etc. This is what is known as "being cute". But it was a conversation starter (boy, was it ever), and it enabled Topps to kick off its flagship with star power, or what I like to call "nine-pocket power". Because the established players often wear numbers as low on the numerical scale as possible, the first nine cards in the 2013 set overflows with notable players as you can see here. They're not as notable as they could be because there are stars who wear double digit numbers, too, but in general, this page has significantly above-average nine-pocket power. And it provokes the question, since a lot of collectors operate in a binder-and-page world: what's the best group of nine consecutively numbered cards? The...

I have never shown a page from my Night Card binder in the history of this blog. That is mostly because I am loathe to show a page in which a spot is missing. The beauty of a night card binder is seeing the lights and stars lit up on every pocket of the page, burning brightly against a blanket of darkness. For a long time -- two years now -- I've been aware that I have the ability to complete the first page in my binder. It's been missing one card for that long. That card is card No. 4. It's been a tricky one. In 2013, two night cards that were both card No. 4 appeared almost immediately. One is the Opening Day card of Matt Dominguez. But somehow, Topps made Dominguez look almost grotesque as he strains to throw the ball to first . I didn't want that to have any part of my binder. The other card is the one that you see here. Yadier Molina is my least favorite catcher since Jorge Posada retired. And then Topps has to throw Adam "Mickey Mouse" Wainw...

The Kmart in my area seems to be dangling by a perpetual thread. This is nothing different from most other communities' Kmarts, that is if they still have one. I've been to enough of them to know that I'm one of the fortunate ones in that my Kmart is relatively clean, well-stocked and there are no drug deals going down in the parking lot. I had long given up on Kmart for being a source for cards. It was never very good in that area, but during the early years of this blog, I was able to find mega-discounted blasters of Upper Deck Spectrum and the like. However, during the last several years, the "card area" shrank until it was maybe a couple of racks, next to the service desk, where you had to shop for cards right next to a couple of female employees gabbing about whatever. I've never felt more like a nerd in my adult life. My retail card choices have been Target and Walmart, and I go to them equally because the card availability is a little different at e...