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...

In the quest to own every Dodgers card ever made, you make a lot of compromises with what you know as "a baseball card." In general, a baseball card for me is a photograph of a major league player, background included, arranged inside a colorful design. But there are all kinds of definitions to baseball cards these days. Bowman Draft, for an example, is a weird spin-off of what I know as a "baseball card." It does not contain major league players, for the most part, and in most cases it's filled with cards of players I don't know at all. It's also rife with Topps' version of alternate reality. Players often are photoshopped into uniforms they haven't worn and shown in front of generic backgrounds. Take a look at this Connor Wong card, for example (and no, I didn't know who Connor Wong was until this moment. But thanks to 30 seconds of research I now know that Austin Barnes is the nephew of  Mike Gallego). There doesn't seem to be...