Night Owl Cards

  The National has come and gone for another year but my National is still in the works. Longtime readers know that I don't go to the National, I wrote a post about why last year . Though I'll never rule out going in the future, a card-carrying introvert like me won't regret it if he never attends.   But usually at this time, inspired by the pictures I see from the National, I acquire some cards of my own. I call it "My National".   I'm fortunate enough that I happen to have enough money to spend on cards right when the National is going on, usually birthday-related, but not always. This year I had some money from a Beckett Vintage article plus an unexpected reimbursement check  So I got to acquire cards without blowing cash on plane tickets, gas, tolls, parking, food, lodging and admission, too!    Now, "My National" didn't come without some annoyances, as well. There are still a few cards that haven't arrived due to constant ebay delays tha...

  Is this a new series? I think it might be. I was attempting to hunt down a new angle for the "Joy of a Team Set" series a week or two ago, but I'm starting to feel like I've run out of ideas for that series. I'm not going to end it, I may have just hit a temporary snag, but I thought I'd go in a slightly different direction. I've praised the common, ordinary subset many times on this blog and have devoted a full post to individual ones here and there. I've even written a magazine article focused on them. Subsets seem like a fad of the past, with inserts taking over in the mid-to-late '90s. But the subset still appears periodically. However, I don't count a group of cards as subsets if they are not numbered consecutively in a set. That's the first rule of defining a subset. (Topps, start grouping your league leader cards together again, please). Subsets have been part of main sets since the 1950s, probably longer. During the '50s and ...

  A couple of people have inquired about my well-being. They've seen where I live on the news and that's almost never a good thing.   But they aren't being over-dramatic. Yes, that's a glimpse of my backyard. That bird feeder is usually 3-4 feet off the ground. The amount of snow we've received since late Thursday night, the nature of it and the duration, combined, has added up to the biggest storm I've experienced since I've lived in lakeside cities, which has been more than 37 years now.   Folks are comparing it to the Blizzard of '77 in Buffalo. I was 11 back then. I didn't live in Buffalo. I lived about 4 hours away in Binghamton, where snow comes down in normal quantities. (This past weekend was the first time since I moved away from home in which I actually thought "maybe going back home to live isn't a bad idea.").   In 1977, Binghamton didn't get the kind of snow Buffalo did, but I do remember being off from school for a wee...

  There is really no explanation for me suddenly being able to make such swift progress on the 1956 Topps set other than that "the stars aligned." For decades, the total number of '56 Topps cards in my collection sat at around 120, each one obtained on a single, glorious early 1980s evening, a gift from my dad's co-worker, someone I had never seen and I still don't know his name. Those were the cards that ignited the spark, that this was indeed one of the greatest sets ever made and would be amazing to complete ... you know, in another dimension, where objectives that were obviously impossible became possible. Sure, I now owned one-third of the set. But outside of the Newcombe, Erskine and Slaughter cards, I had no big stars. None of the cards were Yankees, the team of choice of whoever gave us the cards. Then the rest of the 1980s happened and cards became "an investment." The prices for those '56 cards, especially the stars, shot up. As the years m...

Everyone knows that there are good surprises and bad surprises. If you've been on this earth for more than 20 years or so, you've had your share of both. In general, I'm not a surprise guy. I like what I like and I stick to that as much as I can. Some would consider that an attempt by me to control things, and I would say, "I didn't ask for your psycho-analysis," but it's more of a roll-with-the-punches thing. I'd rather know what's coming -- because the bad surprises can wear one down -- but if something unexpected shows up, I'm still able to handle it without panicking or running away. When it comes to cardboard, there are more good surprises than bad. Sure, there was that one time when someone sent me 868 Eric Karros cards from 1992 Upper Deck (yes, I still have them). But most of the card surprises are positive, I've found. Card collectors are a thoughtful bunch. Take a recent envelope that I received from RC McBride the ot...