Night Owl Cards

It's pretty obvious that I enjoy '70s baseball and baseball cards more than baseball and cards from any other decade. I think I've made that rather clear in seven-plus years of posts. But because I enjoy self-examination so much and because I thought it might be handy to have it all in one place, I decided to review the reasons why I like '70s baseball and cards so much. These are solid, concrete reasons that need to be known. And I'm going to do this with some cards that I received recently from mr. haverkamp that all relate to the '70s. First, let's get the big one out of the way: 1. I was a kid then. Most of us view our childhood years through a nostalgic filter. The days were carefree, candy was 5 cents, the sun shined every day and the snowstorms were epic. We don't even notice that those last two memories conflict with each other. I'm not immune to this. In fact, I roll around in nostalgia too much. My childhood was pretty a...

Well, the best glasses in the history of MY baseball cards, anyway. Often I receive a comment on a previous post that inspires yet another post. That's a pretty standard blogger phenomenon, I think. And that's what happened when Patricia of Dinged Corners left the following comment on my post about the 1981 Topps Kent Tekulve card: "KT wore the best glasses in the history of baseball cards." Wait, is that a challenge? Game on! I'm a sucker for "the best" and "the worst." I love lists and all of that ranking nonsense. Did KT really wear the best glasses in the history of baseball cards? I went right to my collection to find out. What I came up with was the best 25 glasses cards. Unfortunately, I'm lacking a ton of cards from the '60s, so there are no horned-rim beauties on this list. One day, after I win the lottery, I'll buy up every set from the '60s and assemble every card of horned-rim wearers as if they are in the stands a...

When you were a kid, what was the oldest baseball card that you had ever seen? Not the oldest that you ever spotted in a book or a magazine, but the oldest you had held in your hands, whether it was card you owned or not? For me, it was a 1971 Topps Manny Mota. Not the one pictured here. This is a lovely updated model. The one that I saw was literally lying in the gutter. I was walking home from school one day and I saw it crumpled along the road side, trembling, injured badly. I picked it up gently. It was in terrible shape. Creases and folds everywhere. Parts torn off of it. I took it home, and bandaged it in Scotch tape, but I could do nothing for the gaping hole in Mota's midsection. So I just slapped some more tape on it and hoped for the best. That Mota card survived, and it lasted a long time in its shoebox home before I bought this new one. Back then, to me, the 1971 Topps set was the most ancient set I ever knew. It was so OLD. Only my friends' older (and meaner) brot...

Today, when we talk about Topps and it not being up-front with its customers, we talk about "the gimmick," in all of its various forms of sneakery. But Topps isn't new to the deception game. Back in the day, sneakery came in the form of the photo on the front of the baseball card. I'm not talking about mere airbrushing. I'm talking about Topps creating photographs for cards of events that never happened . Take two examples from a year in Topps history that features countless examples of bizarre photography, 1973. Many of you know some of these beautiful disasters by heart. There's the Frank Robinson card ... ... In which the only finger Topps lifted in order to celebrate Robinson's arrival with the California Angels was to white-out the word Dodgers across his jersey. "They'll never be able to tell!" the graphics people chortled, forgetting that the Dodgers wear one of the most recognizable uniforms in baseball and that their stadium ...