Night Owl Cards

  Starting a Blog Bat-Around these days is kind of like announcing in 1989 that you just bought a vinyl record. Nobody cares, everyone's moved on to compact discs/TikTok.   But records came back, and are dumb expensive, so maybe blogging will, too. Anyway, this is a Blog Bat-Around for the seven of you that blog and care about this topic.   Not Another Baseball Card Blog has already kicked it off . This theme came from a Bluesky discussion and was specifically mentioned by Shlabotnik Report , I think. What are cards you like that feature a team you don't like?   This could get very involved for me. There are a lot of cards I like, often showing teams I root against. And my dislike for teams can spread like a disease covering two-thirds of major league franchises. It all depends on the baseball scene at the time, whether playoffs are involved, etc.   But to keep this manageable, I'll cover four or five teams. And most of the cards I'm showing are coming from ch...

  Last week Diamond Jesters celebrated his milestone birthday with a week's worth of posts featuring cards with a number that matches his birth date. He invited others to do so as a blog bat-around.   I love a good blog bat-around. But I had already written a post with this theme two years ago on my birthday. So I weighed not participating at all with having to come up with a post of original material and ... sequel it is!   Here are 10 more cards with 716 on the back. I guess these are the second-best, though it would be tough to tell as it's not a number where Topps or anybody else was stashing their stars. Just like the last time I did this, I'll mention whether I have the card or not and if I don't, I'll add whether I'd like to own it.     2006 Topps Update Barry Bonds HR History, 716th HR   Do I have this card? No. I may have had it at one point, when I was including the massive HR History insert set in my quest to have everything related to 2006 Top...

  All right, we're blog batting around again! These come in super-handy when the window is super-tight for blogging, which it is today and tomorrow. (But May is almost over!) John's Big League Baseball Blog asks us to discuss our favorite player's final base card, the one that wrapped up his career. That card must be from a major set, no inserts, later retro cards (such as the one shown above), relics or autographs or buybacks. I like the way John thinks. Base cards never got anyone into any kind of hobby trouble. Can't say the same for a lot of that other stuff. My all-time favorite player is Ron Cey. His career ended quite awhile ago. Here is his final Topps base card:   What's that? You say that's not Ron Cey's final base card? He has cards later in his career when he played for the Cubs and A's? Oh come on, you don't believe those urban legends do you? This is what happens when too many people make too many custom cards and start churning out th...

  All right, time to inject a little spirit of community into the blog world again. Everyone's gone off into their own directions, even if they didn't ditch their blog 10 years ago. What we need is another Blog Bat-Around. This version was started by Matt of Diamond Jesters . Inspired by his recent pull of a Tony Gwynn bat relic in 2024 Topps, he listed his top five pack-pulled hits. I'm taking up the challenge, but, per usual, I've got to complicate things. For starters, Matt used handy-dandy TCDB to determine what hits he's pulled over the years. There's a way to filter out just those kinds of cards in your collection. However, I've received a number of hit cards -- autographs and relics -- from other collectors and they're all mixed in now. It's difficult to figure out what came from what. I am relying on my trusty blog instead, it's got a pretty good record of what I've collected in the last 15-plus years. But the second issue is: what is...