Night Owl Cards

  When faced with the decision of watching the so-called "World Series rematch" between the Dodgers and Blue Jays or the Sabres' showdown with the Lightning last night on the TV, I chose the Buffaloes in their goat-head jerseys.   Rather easy choice actually. My wife's a Buffalo gal and back on the hockey bandwagon, the baseball game was No. 10 out of 162 and not worth the hype and, finally, have you seen the conditions outside? Does not look like baseball season to me!   It snowed last night and this morning. April 7th. I had to clear off the vehicle like it was February. And the wind hasn't stopped since February, too. That is nothing-to-do-but-watch-hockey-inside weather.    It turned out to be a great game (the Dodgers took care of business, too). The Sabres beat those annoying Lightning 4-2. Jack Quinn (see above) scored the empty-net clincher. The Sabres have been doing just about everything right since January and they're hanging onto their players, too...

(*music fans, go to the end) The National is this coming next week and I know several collectors who are attending. Many of them attend every year or close to it.   I'll be in my usual spot, spending much less money and happy not to deal with crowds. Meanwhile, I have some cards here from someone who is planning to go to the big show in Chicago, or maybe is already on the way to digging in discount boxes.   Some of you have also recently received cards from Stuart at S.R. '75 Cards . So this is my turn to decipher what he sent, because a lot of it was from that black hole collecting period of the early 2000s. As an example, I had neatly separated the envelope into cards I needed and cards I didn't. Per usual, I turned the duplicate cards over to signal to my future self that I had them.   One card on its reverse side at the top of the stack caught my eye.     Card-creating gentlemen, this is why you always serial-number your cards in gold foil. I was looking at ...

   The hits keep on coming. Still crazy busy here, as soon as something is resolved, more shows up -- "Hello! Deal with me!!"   I'm not going to get into it all. I do that too much and, well, there's not enough time to bore people. So, hey, here are some relatively recently arrived cards that I'll bang out in hopefully a few minutes!!   Dennis at Too Many Verlanders graced me with a surprise envelope a couple weeks (or more?) ago. Much appreciated. So much that among the chaos I frantically looked for some cards to set aside for him once things blew over. I came up with one card. It's been staring at me for days. Obviously not the time for that. But it's a nice card!     I'll start with the best card from what I needed. It's a 1998 Leaf Fractal Materials something-or-other that I'm still trying to decipher, obviously a riff on his 1993 Leaf rookies card. The card looks shinier in person, sorry for the dull picture. And it's numbered to 3,2...

(I have finally reached the 64th Cardboard Appreciation card since the last time we voted a card into the Cardboard Appreciation Hall of Fame. Way back in 2017! That means after this card, it's time to vote one card from the most recent 64 into the the C.A Hall with the fifth version of the Cardboard Appreciation Hall of Fame Tournament! I'm not sure how to do this since Blogger has removed the polling option. I could look around for another poll to upload. So, it'll take me time to research that. Any suggestions are welcome. Meanwhile, it's time for Cardboard Appreciation. This is the 312th in a series):   You guys have been holding out on me. This is the final base card Dodger that I needed to complete the 1997 Pinnacle Inside team set. It wasn't Piazza or Nomo, as it traditionally is for this time period. It was Park and his wacky head band strolling through the dugout.   I didn't discover the card was the lone one missing until I was recently filing my late ...

Today, I'm told, is the 30th anniversary of the birth of the World Wide Web. What a wonderful invention that was. You wouldn't be reading blog post No. 4,222 of Night Owl Cards without it. Where would I be, where would my collection be, where would my bank account be (that's debatable) without good, old WWW. That said, I'm fully prepared if this all breaks down tomorrow. I'm ready to collect by myself with a notebook and a pen, 1988-style, when somebody pulls the plug on the internet and we can't get it back. I'm prepared because I just plain expect technology to fail. I think many of us are like that. We rely on technology. We think technology is great. We sing its praises. But underneath it all, we're waiting for it to fail. There is a well-known and immensely popular book titled "When Technology Fails," which is one of those lighthearted disaster-survival reads. There are oft-repeated throw-away lines about technology such as, ...

I received a ponderous number of Dodger cards from the late '90s/early '00s from Play at the Plate a couple of weeks ago. I don't have much more to say about cards from this era than I already have. They are indeed welcome, but because they come from a time when I didn't collect and really paid little attention to baseball, most of the pleasure I get from them is checking them off the list. My want lists from this time period are vast and pretty much immortal. I can't possibly hope to kill off all of them in my lifetime. And as evidence, Brian sent me around 60 cards directly off those want lists from the late '90s/early '00s and barely made a dent. In fact, let's head down the rabbit hole and see exactly how much damage he did from sets of that insane, spastic era. Let's hope I can get back out the other side. TOPPS 1999 Stadium Club Cards acquired: two Cards left on the want list: three Thought I'm left with here: The ...