Night Owl Cards

The ultimate reward for a miscut card is that I treat it as its own distinct card. This doesn't always happen. I'm not a collector of miscuts, so often the card will end up in the dupes pile or (*gasp* *how could you?*) in the trash. For a miscut card to avoid that fate, it needs to provide something interesting outside of it being a mere cutting mistake. Enter this 1982 Topps card of Fernando Valenzuela sent to me by Bru .    It looks nice and normal on the front, a familiar shot of the first solo base card of Valenzuela that Topps had produced. Perhaps that alone would disqualify the card from being a distinct miscut. There is nothing about the front that tells you that there's something different. Oh, but the back: That is two separate players on the back of that card, and neither one of them is Valenzuela! In fact, there's more about Hal McRae and Reggie Jackson on the back of this card than Fernando. Even better (or worse) is that Valenzuela is carting around on th...

  Around this time of year, my world ramps up and I get amped up.   The Super Bowl makes things busy at work and also for me as a fan. Usually, February means the start of area high school playoffs that continue throughout the month and into March. That's not going to happen this year, but a few teams are going to start playing some games soon and that's practically the playoffs for them (and us, too) during pandemic times.   February also means the beginning of "birthday season" in my family and extended family. And sometimes I'm thrown two weeks of a Winter Olympics to handle as well.   Into all of this, Topps decides to release its most anticipated set of the season, the reason for it existing really, the First Cards Of The Season.   I've always considered this a terrible time to release its set. Not only am I incredibly busy but the weather is usually ass. Six-foot piles of snow in the Target parking lot is not uncommon. But I shovel myself out because it...

    The past year has forced me to expand my means of obtaining baseball cards. While purchasing cards at the store or on COMC has vastly decreased, buying on ebay and Sportlots has increased.   Consider it a trend for 2020. There have been many other hobby-related card trends this year (check out my end-of-the-year post for those), some of which I've participated in a little. But one of the blog crazes of late -- trading on Trading Card Database -- I've avoided so far.   Unlike hoarding toilet paper or plundering card aisles, I'm down with trading on TCDB if that's what you want. It makes sense for certain traders. But I'm not one of them. Yet.   First, to trade successfully on TCDB, you have to upload your collection on the site. I'm sure you don't have to upload the whole thing, but the thought of listing out even one-seventh of my 100,000-plus cards makes me want to crawl into a corner. Second, I like to keep my trading outlets to one or two avenues. If ...

The first four years of this blog, you could find me in the card aisle at a Target or Walmart at least once a week, possibly twice a week, even three times a week a few times. The name of the game back then was the very latest. Get it, show it, maybe even before anyone else did. Since I don't live in a large metropolitan area, I would often lament the amount of time it took for the most recent product to arrive on store shelves here. Fast forward eight years to the very weird year of 2020. You can find me in a Target maybe once every two months. You can't find me in a Walmart at all. I probably haven't shown the latest cards first on my blog in at least two years. The game has changed, because I have changed, the blogs and social media has changed, and the world has changed. There's really no point to venturing out to card aisles anymore. Why? There's nothing there and even when there was, there was nothing there. Ya dig?  The law of diminishing returns i...

Yesterday, Ryan from Beckett Media announced the old-school Topps designs chosen for this year's Archives set, which will be released in the summer. The three designs selected for 2020 Archives are: 1955 1974 2002 Yes ... 2002. More on that in a moment. I don't think I'm saying anything controversial when I state that these are not three of the more popular Topps designs. In fact, with many collectors, these are three stinkers. But I'm not one of those collectors. Two stinkers? Sure. But three, well that would mean you're underestimating 1974 Topps for about the bamillionth time. I love the 1974 set. If you've been paying attention to this blog at all, you know that. I've written several odes, including this most recent one that I'm going to tell myself caused Topps to run back into its work office and exclaim "WE HAVE GOT TO PUT THE '74 DESIGN IN ARCHIVES NEXT YEAR!!!" This is the first baseball card design I ever saw...