Night Owl Cards

Last week I headed down to my parents' house to get ready for the final goodbye to Dad. I figured I'd need a little pick-me-up while I was there, so I stopped at a Target on the way and grabbed the only thing on the baseball card rack that interested me -- a blaster of 2019 Big League. I also planned on this blaster being my Father's Day baseball card gift if I didn't get one from those people who tend to buy me Father's Day gifts. It proved to be a wise move because not only did I pull the above Max Muncy card, which if you ask me is the front-runner for card of the year, but I in fact received zero baseball card gifts for Father's Day. That is not to say that the family did not choose well on the gift front. Both gifts I received involved food, which I would say runs a close second to cards except for the three times a day when it beats cards by a mile. My daughter went so far as finding a gift in a fancy cheese shop near where she goes to school. I...

This card has sat on my Nebulous 9 list for far too long. It was easily the most available card on that list for a long period of time and for months and months and months it was the last card I needed to complete the 2017 World Series subset from 2018 Heritage. I finally received the card from Henry at Cardboard Greats . He's the one guy with the guts to send me this card, apparently. I actually don't know why the other cards from this subset arrived so readily (some I pulled, some came via card packages) but this one did not. The only thing I have to go on is it shows the one Astro to do the most damage to the Dodgers in that World Series, hitting a game-winning home run in extra innings of a game that the Dodgers could easily have one. But that was nothing exceptional in that series. It was a crazy back-and-forth series, full of tension, excitement and crushing lows. And this wasn't even the one late-night, walk-off Astros victory, it happened again in that biza...

There is one blogger that sort of likes the same things I like when it comes to cards. He's much more of a player-collector and an autograph selector than I am, but we both have the same nose for older, oddball cards. Fuji swooped in and nabbed the 1970s/80s Renata Galasso Glossy Greats just before I was going to say "MINE!" during the recent contest draft on The Collector's card blog. And just before that, he announced that he had completed the 1975-77 Kellogg's 3-D sets in one, fell, swoop, throwing me into a jealous rage (OK, more like a jealous funk). Fuji is now trying to land the 1978, 1979 and 1980 Kellogg's 3-D sets -- three items that I am also targeting -- and I'm sure he will get them all before I do. Fuji landed himself quite a deal at a card show for those 75-77 Kellogg's cards and I'd certainly jump at it if any dealer in my part of the country was that generous, but aside from deals for full sets landing in my lap, I...

Does this look like Clayton Kershaw to you? It doesn't to me. Not really. I don't enjoy analyzing an artist's work like that. I like my card images to be literal and I know art is often not literal. That's why I prefer photography to painting/drawing when it come to my cards. On the other hand, I appreciate recent "art sets" like Gallery and Fire and past editions like National Chicle, and the Allen and Ginter inserts. Sure, you're going to find some images that seem way off in sets like that (although Gallery is rather impressive in its consistency). But I like drawings and have somewhat of a drawing background. Anytime a drawer can draw an accurate likeness of a person, I'm impressed. This card is from 2017 Topps Museum Collection's "Canvas Collection" insert set. It came my way from Henry of Cardboard Greats . He found a handful of cards mostly from my 2017 want lists, which are not exactly in order. The cards he sent caus...

Awwww, isn't little Corey cwute? I'm still in decompression mode. I'm also in need of clearing a few cards out of the way so I can make room for the growing backlog of cards that I need to send people (the approaching drumbeat of September is just the best). So I've got a few small packages from people here that go nicely together because I say they do. For starters there was a Seager-centric envelope from Not Another Baseball Card Blog . Two of the three cards in it were cards of the Dreamy Corey. (Dodger Twitter folks, almost all of whom are vastly younger than me, are fond of saying "Damn, Corey" when Seager does something well. I will never understand people vastly younger than me -- or at least people vastly younger than me who write Dodger things on Twitter). The main card -- the card that intrigued me -- was something Mike pulled from a repack box, I believe. It is a card with a Beckett Baseball magazine theme. This image was the cover o...