Night Owl Cards

  Something that Johnny's Trading Spot wrote on one of his recent posts got me curious. He mentioned his ranking on Trading Card Database in terms of all cards entered -- or how many cards you have in your collection, according to TCDB.   I knew all about totaling your collection on the site, but I didn't know you could compare it with other TCDBers' total collections the way you can with total cards of players in your collection or total cards of teams in your collection.   I was immediately intrigued -- and had no idea how to find that information. I looked around for a little bit before my patience ran out after 5 minutes and I emailed Johnny. Turns out it's way at the bottom of TCDB's main page where the columns of links are listed. In the last column is a link called "Stats," which is where I found the info.   Here are the bad boys who lead the way:   Good grief, that's a lot of cards.    I knew right away that I wouldn't be anywhere near the...

(A chilly welcome to you all on "Old Stuff Day". Apparently this day was created to encourage people not to do "the same old stuff" and then modified to encourage people to clean out their "old stuff." But I will choose to recognize the day by showing my card Old Stuff. Like I do many days of the year on this blog! Time for Cardboard Appreciation. This is the 349th in a series):   I added these two Drake's cards from Diamond Jesters' Time Travel series . The Drake's cards from the 1980s have always interested me for a few reasons.   a) The 1981 Drake's set was the first time I owned a complete set. It was very easy to do, all I had to do was send away for it and the 33 cards were mine. I wrote about it a number of years ago .   b) That same '81 set is numbered by race. Yeah, really. Coincidence or not, it's there as plain as the cardboard it's printed on. I did a post about that, too, after being tipped off by a commenter and f...

  I joined this hobby, was sucked into it, in the mid-1970s. Not too long into my time in the club, maybe a couple of years, I caught on to the one primary goal of card collecting.   The name of the game was completion, set completion.   That's changed in the nearly 50 years since. Sure, there are still set collectors, but we're a much smaller percentage of the entire collecting scene, unlike when I was a kid, when it was just about 100 percent.   Still, I can't get that goal from the '70s out of my blood. It's there forever. It is THE reason why I collect -- to complete the mission, to finish the set, whether it's a team set or a set set. This is what makes sense to me in the hobby, and no matter how much I try, I still can't fully grasp what the heck other collectors are doing if they're not trying to finish sets. What does it even mean? So, my second Sportlots order of the year arrived recently, the last cards showed up today. Without even thinking ab...

    There are few bloggers who have consistently built my collection like Bob . In the past there was Dave from Tribe Cards, Dan from Saints From the Cheap Seats, and Eric S., whose blog name I don't remember. They would flatten your home with a few palettes of cardboard and leave snickering while you looked around the property in a stupor. But bloggers don't have the means they once did. (Johnny's Trading Spot aside). Postage is crazy, cards are expensive and nobody has the time to blog anymore. If I'm gonna get a monster package, it's probably going to come from a reader, with a little more free time. Bob has been the recent exception. He sent another blast, as varied as ever.   A pin from the 1988 World Series. I love the notation "Dodgers beat A's in 5" so everyone knows what happened. I don't have much knowledge about commemorative pins and there seems to be 27 versions for every event, but a few key ones are nice to have. A couple of Bills fr...

I'm a pretty advanced collector, I would say, but I just can't get out from underneath the junk wax era. It's been 30 years since then and I'm still coming across junk wax cards that I need. This is from the 18-card Upper Deck Silver Sluggers set issued in 1991. TCDB says this set was issued one card per jumbo pack. I assume that means you could find them only in hobby shops? As a mere retail collector in '91, I had no idea what a jumbo pack was. But now, thanks to reader Mike, who sent along a nice selection of needs, I have completed the Dodgers portion of the Silver Sluggers set, a two whole cards, 30 years after it was issued during a period known for how abundant cards were ... and still are. But some were sneakily elusive. I looked quickly through my wants from this time period to see what else I need from years of easily attainable cards. This is a brief rundown of brands that are not complete in my collection as far as Dodgers: Classic, Dodgers Police Set (...