Night Owl Cards

  I may whine about all of the promoted platforms for obtaining cards -- according to who you talk to, the best place for finding cards is ebay, sportlots, COMC, TCDB, cardbarrel, Facebook, Twitter, or something I don't remember because that's too many places -- but I recognize the importance of staying connected. If you want to trade like we did on the blogs in the old days, you either have to add a platform to your inventory -- something like Facebook or TCDB -- or stay connected to as many bloggers and former bloggers as possible.   The latter can be a lot of work, bloggers aren't as accessible as they once were. Everyone seems to be busy. Fortunately, I've been around for quite awhile with a high-profile blog so bloggers of all sorts -- current ones and former ones -- think of me when distributing cards.   Thanks guys!     You're looking at the first-ever die-cut card. Who knew that Post was offering die-cut parallels in 1962? This homemade jobbie arrived fr...

The start of the busiest period of the entire work year began this week. This weekend is packed with sports chaos, and I expect every week and weekend to be like that until late March. You don't notice the bedlam here because I try to keep it away from the blog as much as possible. Good ol' night owl just keeps posting as much as he can. But it wreaks havoc in other hobby ways. The organization of my collection is always a disaster at this time of year. I have trouble sending cards out to people. If I can even get cards packaged, the packages often sit there lonely for sometimes weeks. And, every once in awhile, I throw out a rambling post like this with no cohesive thought. The cards are deserving of more, but sometimes a dude's got to eat and pay bills and figure out why the car suddenly sounds like a chipmunk stuck in the engine, you know? So let's just accept the disarray. Above is a signed card of the recently deceased Doug Harvey. I received it from M...

A couple of years ago, I wrote a post titled "Let's Complete a Team Set Today" . It was a happy little tale about how I completed the 1996 Fleer Team Wax Dodgers set, as confusing as Fleer made it that year. But that was mere peanuts compared with what we're going to do today. I have a list on my sidebar called "The Nebulous 9". I like to put the final card needed from a particular team set on that Nebulous 9 list, because there is nothing more satisfying than completing a set. You may have noticed that the list is now down to three cards. That's because I won a contest at Bob Walk The Plank and he decided to wipe out my needs on the Nebulous 9. Because of his decision, he completed six team sets for me. SIX. Let's take a look at them now: 2015 Topps Archives Dodgers . Completed. Technically, there's still that stupid short print Jackie Robinson card. But I'm not paying $25-$50 (that's what it's going for these da...

Not a lot of cards have come to the house the last couple of weeks. It's that end-of-the-year busy time, and money is devoted to various holiday expenses instead of cards. As mentioned before, I don't get involved with the Black Friday hobby deals, because spending money on myself at this time is not recommended if I know what's good for me. I have just two cards on my desk that I have received that are waiting to be shown. Each arrived as a one-card package. Each has a tale to tell. The first is a jersey card of Jim Kelly sent to me by Matt of Bob Walk The Plank . It is my first jersey card of Kelly, and probably only my second or third jersey card of an NFL player ever. My NFL collecting is very limited. But if you're going to throw a jersey at me, make it of the quarterback when I covered the Bills back in the late 1980s. This card is from 2006 Donruss Elite. The back assures that this swatch was taken from an actual jersey worn by Jim Kelly in an offic...

Just because I'm old doesn't mean I don't enjoy new experiences with cards. I dabble in them all the time; I still like sampling and trying out things. How do you explain that pack of Bowman I bought last week? (Oh, didn't I tell you about that? That's an indication of how impressed I was). No, if I was truly finished with new experiences, you'd see nothing but pre-1980 cards here and a complete unwillingness to understand modern cards and card strategies, rather than the semi-unwillingness to understand modern cards and card strategies that you already see. Why just in the last few days I've experienced a couple of "new-to-me" moments. The first has to do with the card you see up top. It is a 2007 Fleer Ultra gold parallel (not to be confused with "gold medallion") of Nomar Garciaparra. It's even numbered to /999 in that dot-matrix way that Ultra serial-numbered things. But the "new" part is that I received ...

I received footwear for Father's Day. Don't bother to ask about kind or brand names. I don't care about that stuff anymore. I'm a middle-aged man, far beyond the age of obsessing about what you see when you look down. I'm a forward thinker! Who also spends a lot of time looking backward! But at least I'm doing it in an upward fashion. In fact, just as important as what was inside the box is the box itself. As I was opening the package, I realized that these shoeboxes were much needed. I have just two shoeboxes that store cards and that has been the way it's been for quite awhile. Most of my cards are in binders or in those long card boxes. But dupes are starting to pile up, and I have carved out enough space in a closet to fit in two extra shoeboxes. I can't wait to add some cards to them. It takes me back to when I was a kid. Before binders and hobby-customized boxes, all of my cards were in shoeboxes. That's just what you did with card...

Somebody somewhere may have wondered why night owl hasn't entered $30 A Week Habit's contest to win a 1954 Topps Duke Snider card. It's vintage. It's a Dodger. Where is he? Well, as much as I'd like to own two 1954 Topps Duke Snider cards so I can compile a week's worth of posts boasting about my '54 Snider dupes until I annoy everyone with a blog, one of these babies is plenty. I happen to own this card already. It was sent to me over the summer. In fact, that card just went on a little tour of the house with me. I took it out of its abode, a smallish blue binder and set it down on the hamper while I was taking a shower (yes, I let a '54 Snider in the bathroom, exposed to dampness and all of the havoc that a bathroom could cause to a piece of cardboard, and it wasn't even wearing a toploader. Call the baseball card cops!). Then I took it through the living room, where the dog eyed it hungrily. And I scanned it and it's sitting on the des...

I spent three days researching yesterday's post and it received about as many clicks as one of those awesome night card posts that takes me 20 minutes to do. I know it shouldn't matter and that the only rule on this blog is to write about what I think is interesting. I know all that and have known it for years. But this is the continuation of a trend in readership that I've seen over the last month or two, and I'm coming to the conclusion that readership -- I'm not talking solely numbers here -- is not the same as it was four or five years ago. But that's a topic for another time. Tonight, in my cranky state, instead of occupying all of my time (and yours) on research that only I find fascinating, I'm going to rely on what everyone finds fascinating -- baseball cards!!!! In other words, cards that people sent to me! The truth is I'm spent. Yesterday's post only took some of my time. The vast majority has been occupied by work. For exampl...