Night Owl Cards

I have a feeling there will be more than two of these "Spot the Difference" posts, judging by the reaction to the first one. There were lots of responses to my last post on this topic, both in the comments and on Twitter, with additional examples of cards that feature design color elements that don't jive with the design colors used with fellow teammates. I thought I'd show some of those suggestions here, along with a couple others that I knew about that I didn't show the last time. The 1988 Topps set was mentioned a lot because it featured several color differences and I knew that. The one that gets mentioned the most is the Keith Comstock card, which is actually a variation that was corrected, which is why it received so much attention back in the "error frenzy" of the 1980s. The blue team letters is the correct version and the white team letters is the variation. But enough of that, we're here to find the differences that were n...

The February/March edition of Beckett Vintage Collector should have arrived in subscribers' mailboxes by now and may or may not have reached magazine aisles at your favorite chain bookstore or supermarket (I don't know for sure because it takes me an hour to drive to somewhere with a magazine aisle). Inside that Vintage Collector is another article from me. It's my sixth one now. To think, at this time last year, I was celebrating my first. The article is about the 1980 Topps set, which was the final Topps flagship set issued during the Topps monopoly era. That was exactly 40 years ago, before the arrival of Donruss and Fleer the following year. Many collectors who didn't arrive upon the hobby scene until later in the 1980s or the 1990s seem to regard the monopoly era as a strange and unpleasant place. With abundant card options at their disposal for 40 years now, how could anyone live on just one card set a year? It honestly wasn't that bad. It was pr...