Night Owl Cards

  I'm not doing a very good job banging out these Team MVP posts like I wanted to. After discovering back in March that it had been a year-and-a-half since the last one, I resolved to quicken the pace on these.   But this is the first one since March. Oh well.   My overall goal in this series is to find the "best" card for each team for every set I've completed. I began by going in reverse order from the year of the set. I reached back all the way to 1981. Then I backtracked for sets I've completed since.   Now I'm all over the place, basically tackling sets however I feel, arbitrary rules be damned!   So, right now it's 1986 Fleer. Fleer is the best brand for when you want to write a quick post, because the set's ordered by team, as if it had this very series in mind! Thanks, Fleer!   On the other side -- woof, this is a hurting set. I've mentioned many times that I've overlooked '86 Fleer for decades before finally completing it -- forgot...

I was surprised to see that I haven't written a post from this series in a year-and-a-half . That's long enough that I probably need to provide a refresher on the mission behind these posts.  The goal is to find the best card per team for sets that I have completed. I've been running this series since 2010. And as I update the series, I go farther and farther back in time -- the ultimate goal, to get to the 1956 Topps set, which is the oldest I have completed.   But whenever I complete a new set, I press the switch on the time machine that says "forward" and review whatever newer set I have completed.   Since I haven't done one of these in awhile, I've completed several sets that need Team MVP reviews. The farthest back I've gone is 1981 but there is so much more recent ground to cover. Heck, I've completed 2024 Topps and 2022 and, ick, 2021. And then there are mid-1980s sets that I've completed more recently, like 1985 and 1986 Fleer. It's...

  I was making good progress with this series for the last couple of years, steadily going back in time as I figured out the best card for each team for a particular set I completed. But then I had to go and complete some 1980s sets and we are hurtling through time in the opposite way. As a reminder, if I complete a set, I stop at whatever point I was at and cover the set I completed.   The one I'm covering this time is 1989 Fleer. ... Yes, I hear your groans. I'm groaning, too.   As I've said many times, I gave '89 Fleer almost zero respect in 1989 and in the decades to follow. I ignored it in 1989, didn't buy a single pack. And I never felt like I missed anything.   But one day, Johnny , sent me a whole box of the stuff and, what the hell, there are players on these cards from when I still really adored baseball, so, sure, let's add it to the pantheon of completion.   There is no real personal context for these cards. My 1989 card story is BUY ALL THE 1989 TO...

  One thing that I know is happening in 2023 is my 40th high school reunion. At least I think that's the case. I still don't know if I'll attend, but at any rate, I graduated from high school 40 years ago this year. Wow. Would I go back to high school if I could? Absolutely not. I think I have lots of company in that thought. But there are two things that I still like about that time. 1. I was younger. 2. The baseball cards. I have mentioned many times that the advent of three card companies issuing baseball sets all at the same time, was mind-blowing behavior for us youngsters. In 1983, the concept had lost a bit of its novelty -- I still hadn't completed anything two years into this new landscape. But two years prior, wow, the possibilities. In 1981, I was in 10th grade, still clinging to my kid ways. Cards at that time could be found at the drug store down the street, at the mini-mart down the block and at various delis and candy stores, gift shops, hardware stores, ...

  OK, making very modest progress on attempting to put this series to bed. This is the second edition of this series this year, improving on my one-per-year schedule from the last few years. But still got quite a few sets to get through as I travel backwards through the sets I've completed. The last set I covered was 1983 Fleer, and now it's '82 Fleer's turn. This is where I determine the "Team MVP" for each team in a particular set, what I think is the best card. I bought a fair amount of Fleer in 1982. Like in 1981, I was attempting to collect all three sets, which was foolishness for someone on a paper boy's salary. But that's all I knew. I ended up with somewhere around 300 cards in the set, but it was enough to get an idea that the set was not well-photographed nor cropped all that great. However, I like the set a lot, for the color-coordinated borders, the extremely weird and interesting photos and for providing a solid look at the day in the lif...

  I started this series back in 2011. For the first two years I posted three chapters of the series each year. Since then, I've done a chapter a year. I haven't completed the most sets in the world, but at this rate, I'm going to have to live to be a 100 to finish this thing. Maybe I can pick up the pace in 2022? A new episode three days into the new year is a good start. As a refresher, I'm going through all of my complete sets and finding the "team MVP," or what I think is the best card for each team in the set. I've been working backwards through the calendar, but breaking away from the pattern to go back to sets that I've completed since the series began. We're at 1983 Fleer now, a set I finished off last year.   I did not buy much Fleer in '83, quite a bit less than in 1981 and 1982. I liked the 1983 Topps set a lot, and the gray borders of Fleer didn't do it for me. Also, two years of trying to complete three sets had finally wore on ...

  The 1991 Score set is 30 years old this year.   As staggering as that is to hear, it seems about right in other ways. I have written about 1991 Score a whole bunch on this blog and references to it span the life of the blog -- 2009, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2018, 2019 all contain words dedicated to the blue, teal, black and white. I finally completed the 893-card monster a little more than a year ago and talked about it some more then, too. So, really, what I'm trying to do here is get another completed set out of the way in my Team MVPs series. I have reached 1981 in my reverse trip through history but continue to back-track as I complete more recent sets. This is me continuing to back-track with '91 Score. The only other thing I'll mention here before we get to the best card for each team in the set is to say I always wished Score would have picked a border color/theme for this set and stuck with it instead of four different colors (one being very early 1990s). The black-borde...

OK, here we are, 1990 Topps. I've delayed this long enough. In this series, where I find the best card for each team for sets that I have completed, I have tried to go in order from the most recent set I've completed to the oldest sets I've completed. While this series is ongoing, I've completed other sets, so I go back and pick up those sets before moving on to the next oldest one. But I completed 1990 Topps awhile ago, and I haven't gone back. I've been avoiding it. It's not really because I don't like it. I'm kind of over that now. As the years have gone on, I've looked closer at the set and appreciate it more, specifically the attempt to make the cards look like panels in a comic book. But I don't think many people see the set like I do. I agree some of the cards don't look good at all, too many weird colors clashing, I've thought that since I first saw the cards in 1990. And viewing the cards together, in a binder fo...

It's been nearly a year-and-a-half since I wrote one of these posts in this series. I'm not tired of it or anything, I just plain forgot. When I last covered the Team MVPs, I promised that I'd finally get to the 1981 Topps set next and that I would do so "soon," as in by the summer of 2018. Well, I screwed up that promise. Also, technically, I should be doing a Team MVPs post on a more current set because I've completed that since I've passed that year in this exercise. I usually go back to handle those completed-set stragglers. But I won't do that to you. I've already broken one promise to '81 Topps. So here we are in 1981. This set is one of the last from my "childhood" collecting days. I was a teenager by this point, but I still consider it part of my collecting golden age, which includes all of the sets I collected as a kid. I still had some the same wild-eyed enthusiasm for cards at this point as I did in my younger da...