Night Owl Cards

  Greetings, my lovely readers.   There is one thing I love to do most when collecting cards. I think you know what that is.   I love to complete sets.   It's not easy to do and it's getting more difficult. But that's OK, I've completed plenty in my time. Even if I never completed another, I'd always have the dozens and dozens perfectly finished sets to view at my leisure.   Still, I press on.   Just yesterday I completed one. It was pretty easy. I finished 1989 Score.   It took not even a couple of months once I received a pile of them from Bru . And then the final handful showed up this week.    First, these three cards from Detroit Tigers Cards and Stuff . Ol' Boobie Maine happened to open a box of '89 Score at the same time I was trying to complete it! I guess that's not all that coincidental. Even 37 years later there's probably someone opening a box of the stuff almost every day.   The Brian Harper was the gremlin in the set that s...

  It's pretty apparent to me that the number of parallels in every card product has vaulted into another level of ridiculousness in the last year or two.   Counting parallels has been crazy for at least the last 10 years but somewhere around when Panini started Chronicles and then now with what Topps is doing in its main sets, it's almost impossible to keep tabs on all of them, and I don't know what to think of any collector who is trying to collect them all for one player. Pity? Admiration? Concern for Their Financial and Mental Health?  As I've said many times, despite the over-the-top number, I still like a good parallel. Colorful ones are the best. But I almost never chase them anymore. They've jumped the shark and I've stopped watching.   But also they're still a good way to find cards that are new to my collection and if they are Dodgers, I'm going to welcome most of them even while wishing we could go back to the days when there were just gold par...

  Sometimes I wonder if when I write certain sentences, readers see them as a challenge. I put words out into the internet space and people interpret them as they like. It's wild to see what they come up with sometimes. This latest example was no challenge or call to action or dare or anything like that. All I said a couple weeks ago was:  "It's not like I'm looking to pad my collection on (TCDB). I have plenty of his cards (277) and now that's he's with the Rangers, he won't be climbing up from his No. 16 ranking among the players with the most cards in my collection." This is what I wrote about my Corey Seager cards. That's when people grabbed the imaginary gauntlet off the ground, raised it above their heads and exclaimed, "Challenge accepted!!!" OK, that's what I envision based on what I've since received. On that same post, I went through some of the Seager cards I own (that are not scanned on TCDB, and, no, I haven't do...

(Greetings on the first day of Daylight Spending Time. I don't know why we're still doing this time change thing, but I'll take the extra hour of sleep. As for all of the Facebook memes about how dark it's going to be now ... I think you know, the night owl doesn't mind at all. Time for Cardboard Appreciation. This is the 328th in a series): I checked to see if this "Pocket Profile" Corey Seager is listed on Trading Card Database. I couldn't find it. I suppose it's not "card enough" but it seems more card-like than some things that are listed on TCDB. It's not like I'm looking to pad my Seager collection on there. I have plenty of his cards (277) and now that he's with the Rangers, he won't be climbing up from his No. 16 ranking among the players with the most cards in my collection. I am happy though that his Rangers won the World Series. I haven't said anything about the Series here since it ended, mostly because, li...

  I'm not too enthused about the remainder of the MLB postseason. It seems like I say this almost every year, since like 1989, but this year's final four is particularly yawn-inducing. I'll watch -- when I'm not working -- but there will be no recording for later viewing. The Phillies will be the only team I care to see win the World Series and there are two teams left I have absolutely no interest in seeing win ... anything ... at any time. I was going to do another "oldest card," "newest card," for the League Championship Series but I'm not feeling it. Instead, yesterday, I got interested in looking up what former Dodgers were on each of the remaining teams, so let's go in that direction. PHILADELPHIA PHILLIES There are three players on the Phillies' 40-man roster who have played for the Dodgers, although only two are on the current roster. Dylan Covey, who played very briefly for the Dodgers this season, is not active. The two who are ...

  For years, decades upon decades really, I had no idea how many Dodgers cards I had.   Until maybe 10 years ago, I couldn't be bothered with totaling them up. But then I started the process and a couple of years ago I arrived at a total and have been watching it grow ever since.   So I've known I've been coming up on a team-collecting milestone for quite awhile. I wrote about it in that Beckett magazine article about my pursuit of as many Dodgers cards as I can: I wrote that last fall, knowing the day would be coming. It arrived last week. I received a power-packed envelope from reader Simpson. He was one of the winners in the 5,000-post/5,000-card giveaway. I don't expect anything back from anyone from this giveaway, but the cards sure were pretty. And they got me to that milestone! Let's count them in order of how I pulled them out of the envelope: 24,998 This is one of the medallion things from 2015 when Topps was throwing the "first home run" theme at...