Night Owl Cards

  Like many collectors I am completely over relic cards. When searching for a card I want, I'm never looking for a relic card. I don't list them among my wants, I don't consider them when I'm looking to complete a team set. To a slightly less degree, the same goes for autograph cards. I do search for them on occasion, but very rarely is it a card quest of mine. There isn't a single set issued today in which I'll say "ooh, I want that autograph."   My collecting background does not include chasing hits, so this is pretty much par for the course for me, but they're even more irrelevant than ever to me.   So when Johnny's Trading Spot shipped me two long boxes of Dodgers, about 75 of which contained cards with scribbles or embedded with cloth bits, my brain stared at them for a bit. Sure, some I really liked, but a bunch I honestly don't know what I'll do with them. For now, the best thing they're good for is a blog post. I went throu...

You may have noticed that the "Big Fun Game," is all the rage on the blogs. When one game ends, another seems to begin almost immediately. As usual, I can barely keep up, so I enter what I can and hope for the best. If you're stashing secret BFG contests at the end of a post about the Minnesota Twins manager, I'm probably going to miss it. Out of the string of the four recent Big Fun Games, I've been a part of two. That's just the right speed for me. The BFGs take a fair amount of attention and the BFG needs to learn that it has to get in line behind last-minute work bombshells, dog puke and the overwhelming desire for sleep, just to name a few. Still, I entered another one recently because I landed a Carl Yastrzemski rookie in the last one. I may be overworked, but I refuse to totally ignore the words "big" and "fun". This one was called the "The Lucky 13," organized by Stealing Home at All Trade Bait All The Time . I was...

(Today, according to most traditions, is the 12th day of Christmas. Yes, I am one of those people who plays Christmas music until the bitter end. The longer I can hold back the boredom of January, the better. But at least it's one month closer to baseball season! Time for Cardboard Appreciation. This is the 219th in a series): While sorting through relics the other day, deciding which ones to keep and which ones to send out to folks, I came across another card item that had lost its meaning to me. This is the 2007 Sweet Spot Signatures Chad Billingsley card that I displayed a couple of years ago after receiving it in the mail from a fellow blogger. In that post I discussed the fatal flaw of these cards, which is that the signature fades over time. In fact, this card's signature has faded even more than from the time I posted it. Here is what it looked like then: It might be difficult to see, but there was more of a hint of a signature in 2012 than there is now. ...

When you sit and stare at a stack of cards, and then sit and stare at them again, and then sit and stare at them again , you eventually realize something about them. Some cards make me happy, some cards make me unhappy, and some cards, well, I just look at them and think "what's this supposed to be?" That's rather obvious, I guess, but I thought it was interesting that I could get all of that out of one stack of cards sent to me by Zippy Zappy Kenny from Cervin' Up Cards . I'll start with "happy" first because some people get through only the first few lines of a post and then are distracted by college football, or food, or going outside and actually living. Shallow people. Here is the happiest happy. It features the following happy elements: vintage, Brooklyn Dodger, card from the '50s, known baseball character, dude named "Preacher", card off my want list, and just the right amount of wear. Seven happy points for 1954...

Someone apparently thinks all I do is post trades. We all know that's not true. But so what if it was? Would that be so bad? A celebration of what makes the card blog world go round? So that is why I've decided to make this week "trade post week." That's right. A whole week of nothing but trades. That's supposedly what I do all the time anyway, so let's get it right. Hah. Faked you out. I'm not doing that. I couldn't do that. I'd get bored. But showing off trades once in a while? That I can do. And that is what I will do this time. Why I just happen to have this one package here. It's from Ryan of "O" No Another Orioles Blog . I found myself with a Nick Markakis Archives relic a few weeks ago, and I'm here to tell you that this is actual proof that you can still get good stuff for relic cards. I know nobody likes them anymore. But don't tell our brains that. Ryan sent me Dodgers goodies direct from 2013, ...