Night Owl Cards

   One thing that has become very clear to me over the last year is that my way of collecting cards -- the way that was the established primary way of collecting for as long as I've been alive -- is being phased out.   There are a variety of reasons -- and forces at work -- for this. I am reminded of one of them every time I attend the monthly card show.   In the past year, the show has moved from primarily sports cards to primarily RPG/TCG cards. I have less than zero interest in these. When I paid my entrance fee at the table, the guy there asked if I wanted to enter the raffle and gestured toward a gift basket filled with TCG stuff -- don't ask me what it was, I couldn't tell you. I gave the guy a flat "no" that sounded like "of course not."   But I'd say more than half of the tables was Pokemon, Magic and whatever else there is in that fantasy realm. Just about the rest was graded football and basketball of mostly modern cards. But I've writt...

  It hit 90 degrees today. I'm not someone who is bothered by the heat, but once it's 90 I take notice. It's not super rare around here -- I'd say we're in the 90s about 5 times a year -- but I was still tempted to stay inside.   Fortunately I didn't.   I was in a yank to get to the monthly card show. I've been frustrated lately by the lagging arrival of my online card purchases the last couple of weeks. I don't know if this is a traditional July thing (sellers and postal workers on vacation), but shipments are not appearing on the days I was told. Also, I have received back-to-back postage-due slips on orders, which seems a little outrageous.   So it was one of those times where I thought "I can't get anyone to send me my cards, I'm going to go get them myself ." Crank the AC, I'm coming for you, show!   I had no expectations for this show. With just five 1969 Topps cards needed, and none of them available the last time I visited, ...

  You're going to have to wait a little for the vintage on this post, and it's just one card. But I think it's a decent one. So, yeah, that's my tease. First with the modern junk ... er ... stuff.   Kevin from The Diamond King sent me an unexpected envelope a week or so ago. It might have been payback for the 5,000-post giveaway envelope I sent, or maybe I actually requested some of these cards and don't remember. When I'm uncertain, I always land on the side of my feeble memory.   All of the cards, except for one, are modern Dodgers items, like the Koufax Archives card above, and a few are pretty snazzy, too.   For example this from last year's Donruss. I didn't know such a thing existed. It's certainly different for Panini, as the card company is not in the habit of showing actual baseball scenes behind the players.   I admit though I half expected Mookie to move in some sort of lenticular fashion, so that was a small disappointment. Also, this is...

(Greetings. I am lucky enough that no one in my family must be memorialized during this holiday weekend. But, my dad, who served in the Air Force, once parachuted out of a flaming KB-50 tanker plane just before it crashed and exploded in Louisiana. So that's how close I came to never being born. Thanks to all who served and didn't make it back alive. It's time for Cardboard Appreciation. This is the 303rd in a series): Fifty years ago, Curt Flood walked away from his job with the Washington Senators and never came back. He was done fighting, done with the abuse. Baseball had broken him and at age 33, he was, according to a former teammate in this article , "the saddest person he had ever met or seen." There are so many Black men from the '40s, '50s, 60s and '70s that carried the weight of the world around with them, enduring every righteous accusation, every racist rationalization that their vast population of opponents could hurl at them, all in the a...

"Of course," the many collectors who aren't Dodgers fans are saying. "Blasphemy," my fellow Dodgers fans are saying. A few years ago, I would have been right there with the torches and pitchforks: of course the best cards in a trade package are Dodgers cards! But in the last couple of years of really focusing on diversifying my collection, I am naturally drawn to other cards that don't necessarily display Dodgers on the front. Such was the case from a recent envelope from Nick of Dime Boxes . As I always I do when I receive a package from a fellow collector, I -- after my traditional card mail dance around the room -- go through the cards and pull out the ones I need. Once I have that tidy stack, I review which cards stand out and how they might form a blog post. Those cards are placed in a new stack while the others stay where they are while I figure out whether I have anything at all to say about them. Here were the cards -- needed cards -- ...