Night Owl Cards

  I received my first COMC order of the year Monday. I requested shipment on July 12 and it was originally slated to arrive in late August. Instead it showed up in 17 days. That's record time. During a period when ebay service is all over the map (yet I am hounded by PROVIDE FEEDBACK emails the second I receive an order), it's nice to see someone picking up the slack, especially with all the past complaints about COMC delays.   This COMC order is a reflection of my tour through various web sites, card blogs, social media, whatever. Whenever I saw a card that I liked, into the COMC cart it went. That means sometimes when I pulled a card out of the shipment I was like "what'd I order this for?" The only explanation is "human see, human do." I wanted the card at that time.   So here's a look at me jumping off a bridge just because everyone else did it.   Much of these knee-jerk orders involved Dodger cards. I couldn't tell you where or when I saw ...

  This is a team fanboy post so please excuse me for all the Dodger blue. Julio Urias is getting the Opening Day start for the Dodgers tonight against Arizona. He is the 63rd pitcher in franchise history to start Opening Day. I know this because I counted.   I got curious, so I went through retrosheet.org and figured out all of the Game 1 starters for the Dodgers since they began as the "Bridegrooms" in 1890.   Here is briefly what I found: Clayton Kershaw holds the franchise record for the most Opening Day starts with nine. He set the record with his eighth season-debut start in 2018.   Kershaw broke the record previously held by Don Drysdale and Don Sutton, who each started Opening Day seven times in their careers. Kershaw also broke Sutton's record of seven straight seasons of Opening Day starts with his eighth straight start in 2018.   After the top three, Fernando Valenzuela has the most Opening Day starts with six, along with Brickyard Kennedy, who also ha...

  I buy cards a lot. That's how most of the cards arrive in my collection. It's the best way to build a card collection, as painful as it can be for the wallet. I buy from dealers at card shows, from various well-known online sites and periodically from individual sellers on Twitter. There are a lot of people selling cards now. A LOT. It's grown, and is still growing. There are folks on Twitter who sell nonstop. I sometimes have to mute them because I can't take the relentless shilling, even if they're not annoying about it. Then I've noticed that people who used to just tweet regular stuff, their tweets started being all about selling stuff, and, well ... you only have so much cash. And patience. I won't turn my Twitter account into that. I won't sell stuff on here either. Not that a blog is an effective -- or even appropriate -- place to sell cards. The blog world, to me, still is where generosity reigns. It's not as apparent as it once was. I mean...

    I don't have a lot of mini collections. I can't focus on that many hobby things these days anyway, but I've never been the mini-collection type. If I did venture outside of my set/team/player-sphere, one of the collections I would set up is cards of players who later became broadcasters when I was starting to learn baseball. They were my first baseball teachers. Yeah, sure there were youth league coaches and my dad and all that, but I wanted to know about Major Leaguers, not that "keep your eye on the ball" stuff. Fortunately there were guys on TV who told me all about major leaguers. Sure, there were people like Vin Scully and Keith Jackson and Lindsey Nelson and Frank Messer. But the ones who knew all the inside stuff were usually called "the color commentators" and they were usually former ballplayers. Ex-ballplayers like Joe Garagiola, Tony Kubek, Ralph Kiner and Don Drysdale were invaluable to me learning about professional ballplayers and what ...

This is that weird week where school and some government people are off but I'm not -- which gets even more awkward when members of the same household are off but I am not.   In other words, my time is not my own this week. Let's see if I can pound out a post before I'm swept off somewhere.   I finally completed the 2021 Update Dodgers team set the other day. The Corey Knebel card did not arrive when I ordered the team set online (a Royals card arrived in its place). When I alerted the seller, he said he'd get Knebel right out. He never did. Or the postal system ate it.   I put the card on my Nebulous 9 and reader Rich came to the rescue. What a relief. Very frustrating to have dupes of a parallel of this card but not the actual base card. More from Rich in a later post. Good stuff, too.     This card also completed a team set. I discovered that the Don Drysdale card was missing from what I thought was a completed team for the 1978 TCMA set, the 1960s. That had ...

  This time of year is ideal for looking back -- something I do a lot no matter what time of year it is. In fact, I am preparing for my end-of-the-year spectacular, which I hope you'll see tomorrow. But a couple of folks on Twitter the other day were looking farther back than just last year. They were reminiscing about the golden era of blogging, specifically when card blogs started popping up. The first of those card blogs, I think, were around 2005 or 2006. It gets a little murky and people start arguing about who was first, and really, who cares -- people are writing about baseball cards!!! There were just a handful of blogs before 2008, no more than 20. Then 2008 arrived and that was the year of The Card Blog Boom. It's also the year I started blogging, although I had no idea I was joining what was "the thing to do" in the hobby at the time. Twitter folks were remembering that time and how few card bloggers there were then, but exactly how many were there? The gu...