Night Owl Cards

   One thing I still haven't been able to get into my head with this blog, even decades in, is that it's my blog.   You'd think I'd know that by now. I can post whatever the hell I want on here. I can post about happy little trees or rank rust-removal products or list my favorite Pure Prairie League songs. I can write about anything .   But instead I do dumb stuff like avoid showing individual cards that have come into my home recently because only 5 people might care. I make exceptions for cards that somebody has gifted or trade me or a large online order that I can wrap up into a theme, but the scatter-shot purchasing of a card here and there that I always do -- that we always do -- nah, that's not good enough.   I think that's because of my work job. As sports editor, and I've been doing this for a long time, my job is to find stories that are interesting and newsworthy to our readers. That sometimes bleeds over into my blog as I'm creating content he...

A member of The Infield is gone. The Dodgers announced today that Davey Lopes passed away at age 80. He was a central part of my earliest years as a baseball fan. That 1976 Topps Record-Breaker card is in the top 10 of cards that meant the most to me as a boy.   RIP. 

    When I first started reading card blogs, I didn't know there were so many kinds of collectors.   Growing up in the 1970s, there was basically one kind, or maybe two -- set collectors (those who could afford to complete the set) and team collectors (those who couldn't). Decades later I may have picked up on something called "a player collector" but I didn't know any of them.   In my insular collecting world -- basically the way it was for most collectors before the internet -- I figured everyone collected like I did. That's how my friends collected. And when I returned to the hobby in the early 2000s, the few guys I knew around work collected that way, too.   That all changed for me when I started writing a blog. Not only were there player collectors on top of everything I had known, but type collectors -- parallels, short-prints, autographs, relics, Hall of Famers, guys blowing bubble gum, standing for the National Anthem, featuring weird names, shown with...

    Completing the 1970 Topps set wrapped up a project that I have been thinking about for years and for a number of those years didn't seem possible. I've wanted to finish all of the Topps '70s flagship sets for a long time, probably since fairly early into my blogging career. That's when I finished all the '80s sets, before moving on to the early '70s, and now I've got 1970 through 1991 complete and ... um ... shhhh ... I'm at a bit of a loss where to go next. OK, not really. I don't have that kind of a collecting mind-set. There are always next projects. It's just that 1970 was a big set and a big project that took years to finish and that was after 1971 took years and then 1972 took years and then 1973 took years. It makes you step back, and let out a big sigh -- "Woooo, that was something . Let me take a moment." All right, moment's gone. NEXT!   I have a little project finished to show here.   The Davey Lopes card up top was t...

  The Dodgers recognized "The Infield" on Friday on the 50th anniversary of Ron Cey, Steve Garvey, Dave Lopes and Bill Russell first playing together. It seems like they just did that the other day, but I guess 10 more years have gone by since, and, wow, was that fast. That Dodgers infield set the major league record for most consecutive years together and they did it all during my first years of following baseball and the team, from 1973 to the end of the 1981 World Series. I thought I'd take the occasion to look through my cards of each of those players and pick out a few notables for each. Here we go:     RON CEY Total number of cards in my collection: 178 Rank in my collection: 30th Number of autographed cards: 25   Rookie card: 1972 Topps (AL-NL Rookie Stars) Favorite card: 1975 Topps Most difficult to land: 1979 Hostess Most painful card: 1983 Topps Traded   As you could guess, it was tough to choose from my Cey collection, which is easily the most var...

I grabbed a couple of 1975 Hostess panels recently. There's a guy on ebay selling them very reasonably, although I suspect none of them feature short-printed cards. Anyway, it's nice to see some rational sales on that site among all the yokels. I thought I needed both of the panels, but I didn't worry about it too much because the great thing about those '70s Hostess sets is that there are endless possibilities with them. You can collect the panels or the individual cards. You can cut the cards off the panels and improve on the individual cards that you have -- likely trimmed by someone with much inferior cutting skills. You can leave the panel intact and compare it with the other one you have and see which one is trimmed more nicely. I know grading-type collectors turn their nose up on Hostess cards. They're too DIY and there's that whole staining issue. I'm happy that I have something that I can collect that few of them are going to hoard up, although ther...

It looks like I won't have the ability to put together the usual Night Owl Cards end-of-the-year festivities this year. Too much making merry, I guess. That kind of sucks because I do love to tie a bow on the past year. So maybe you'll see it even when we're a few days into 2016. Meanwhile, I thought I'd quickly wrap up one project from 2015, and that's wallet card. Wallet card began at the start of the year over at Baseball Card Breakdown and everyone was enthusiastic about it, including me. But only a few people kept up that enthusiasm, especially after Junior Junkie ran away with the contest portion of wallet card about 15 days into the thing. My enthusiasm started strong then weakened quickly . My mission, unlike those who used wallet card as a travelogue, was to study the wear-and-tear on a card residing 365 days in one's wallet. I didn't even fully succeed there because I changed my wallet card in early March. Let's face it, my heart ...

I'm changing my wallet card. I'm assuming I am now disqualified from the wallet card competition, but that doesn't matter to me. When I chose my wallet card, I didn't have much of an interest in featuring it in various locations. Not only can I not compete with Mardi Gras or New York City, but everyone around here has been hibernating for three months. Repeated pictures of cards in front of snowbanks gets pretty monotonous. No, my wallet card was being used to conduct an experiment in how badly a card could deteriorate in a 12 month period. And I chose a Chrome card because Chrome prides itself on being immaculate and beautiful, and I wanted to see one that wasn't those things. Well, I found out that the above image is about as ugly as Chrome gets. It wasn't terribly bright of me not to draw the conclusion that all of the cards that are meant to be in a wallet - driver's license, credit cards, insurance cards, etc., are glossy and laminated for a ...

Today is Shawn Green's 41st birthday. I recently received a bunch of Dodgers from reader and Dodger fan Stewart that included a smattering of Green cards. Green will always be my Mark McGwire or Sammy Sosa. I don't mean that in a negative, steroid-driven way, although there have been a number of PED accusations lodged at Green. I mean that in a "my team has a player who can MASH" way. The Dodgers don't possess as significant a history of sluggers as others teams do. I've mentioned that several times. Their slugging period was back in the 1950s. That was a long time ago. So when Gary Sheffield hit 43 in 2000 and Green hit 49 and 42 in 2001 and 2002, it was a feeling I've never felt before. "The Dodgers actually hit home runs! A lot!!!" While everyone was drooling over McGwire, Sosa and Griffey, I was picking up the paper to see if Green hit another home run or two. I still think it's an injustice that he finished sixth in the MVP ...