Night Owl Cards

  This is the first Clayton Kershaw card to appear on Night Owl Cards. It showed up on Nov. 6, 2008. Since then, I've charted my growing Kershaw collection. If you had no life and absolutely nothing to do, you could go through past NOC posts and find mentions of each Kershaw card milestone as I reached it. I may list "player collector" third under "set collector" and "team collector" in my hobby bio, but I admit, I've done better adding Kershaw cards in the last year or two than I have completing sets. That's mostly because of inflated prices but also player-collecting is a lot easier. All you need to do is add random cards with your guy on them, and if your player is a star, the cards are everywhere. You don't even have to sweat it until you've gotten, oh, maybe 80 percent of them, and then it gets tough as hell.   Also, zeroing in on a milestone helped spur me along. One thousand, I'm assuming, is the gold standard for collecting ...

  The cards I am showing here are the polar opposite from the ones I showed on the last post, and that's the theme here. I'm conflicted. I've written many times how I enjoy all kinds of cards and I prefer having a somewhat-open mind toward cards. I don't want to be an old crank who shuns the shiny, and I don't want to be a modern magpie, attracted only to cards of the last 20, 30 years. I try to find things I like in most cards. However, I admit: the cards they're putting out these days? It's so much easier for me to find stuff wrong with those ones. This is the conflict. Why am I collecting cards where the flaws jump out at me? Why not collect cards that make me feel warm-and-fuzzy at all times and always? I battle with my desire to remain updated on the players on the field, especially on my favorite team, and the best way to do that for me -- it's always been this way -- is to collect their cards. So I put on a good front, but actually I'm really ...

  I've hit the next milestone in my collection of Clayton Kershaw cards. I'll never consider myself a player collector, but once I hit four figures on cards for a single player I'll have a difficult time convincing anyone of that. It's true, he's my favorite current player and I do chase his cards, although he has to share time with my other pursuits. I received this 2021 Topps Gallery card from reader Rich a couple of weeks ago. This is the 899th Kershaw card in my collection. That meant I actually had to take some time to search out something special for my 900th Kershaw card. The trouble is "special Kershaw cards" go for prices I could not justify paying in a court of law. Even sort-of-special Kershaw cards hold loopy price tags. I miss 2011 so much. So my 900th Kershaw card is reasonably priced, a little bit goofy, and perfect for me: This is from the 2018-19 Montgomery Club set. It's supposed to be a sticker, but it doesn't stick, so I conside...