Night Owl Cards

  I have been quietly accumulated cards from the 1984 Topps Traded set the last couple of months, all the while on the lookout for a complete set for sale online that I could purchase and just be done with the whole thing.   But I lost my shot at a complete set a couple of weeks ago when I missed the ebay "due date," and figured I'd have to resume getting cards piece by piece as I had been doing.    So that had been the pattern, a here-and-there approach that may not be efficient but wasn't making me impatient.   Bo from Baseball Cards Come to Life! had been my main supplier and most recently sent these pair of Red Sox. Gale's time with Boston was very brief.     I received all of these Yankees in a sportlots order. Yes, just the Yankees in that order. Why just them?   Well, around the same time that I was building a sportlots order, I settled on a TCDB trade that included 1984 Topps Traded. For some reason, none of the many '84 Traded in that tr...

  I am in the final stretch in my 1985 Donruss completion quest. Just as I figured several months ago, I am getting this done during the summer when I have time to attack little projects like this.   Dwight Gooden has been placed in his proper page spot in the upper left, next to Barry Bonnell and above Dave Stieb. I am now down to two cards. The Kirby Puckett rookie card is on its way to me. That leaves the Roger Clemens rookie as the final card needed.   Set-collecting veterans know that one of the last stages of finishing off a set is determining what you missed -- what gremlins have slipped past the inventory clerks I have hired to make sure every card has been obtained and documented (check that, I am the only inventory clerk, and I am unpaid).   This time I found four gremlins and I have snagged them all before getting the final two cards -- it's embarrassing when you have the final card documented and then some gremlin ends up being last.   I shall now ex...

  One of the many running sub-themes of this blog is how unobservant I am, and how concerned I am about it.   I scold myself over and over for not noticing things on cards, whether it was painted hats when I was a kid collecting in the 1970s or widely broadcast errors on current cards over the last 20 years. When I do notice a small detail I'm almost triumphant because finally my brain wasn't on auto-pilot.   I get concerned about this "flaw" because my real-life, salaried job is about noticing things. I'm supposed to be an expert on this. I am scouring whatever I can to get sports stories in the newspaper, whether it's locally or nationally. I've become pretty good at it -- well, actually I've been pretty good at it for a few decades now.    So my theory is that I spend so much time on "noticing" in my work life that maybe subconsciously my brain doesn't want to notice so much when it comes to my hobby. That's what I tell myself anyw...

(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 mentioned when I completed the 1988 Donruss set that it marked the first time I had completed four major sets from a given year.   I don't see that happening for me ever again. After the '80s, it's difficult for me to find multiple sets I was interested in enough to try to complete them. For example, I've completed 1993 Upper Deck, I wouldn't bother throwing money at any other '93 set outside of a token Topps complete-set buy. (I'd take a gift of a complete '93 Stadium Club or Pinnacle set but I'm not buying them).   So '88 is a milestone, a one-of-a-kind collecting feat. I like that it's '88. That's the year the Dodgers won the World Series; it's the year I graduated from college; it's the first full year of my wife and I going out. It's basically the last great year before adulthood stomped everything to hell.   To mark the feat, I thought I'd take 10 notable players from this time and compare their cards from th...

  Hello, it's contrarian night owl here, telling another tale about how obsessed we are with saving our cash.   I can tell you're shocked already.   Saving is a good thing, right? It's the American way. Getting the cheapest possible deal on whatever you're interested in purchasing gets you a little gold star or check mark somewhere, correct? Actually, I don't think that's the way it works. Which is why I haven't been much for trying to find the cheapest way to buy cards. I've addressed this before . I see the point if you're on a strict budget or your job status is shaky or you're paying tuition for three kids in college. But saving for saving's sake I just don't get. Sure, I get excited when I find a deal on ebay. And I pat myself on the back when I discover a shirt I bought that I like was on clearance. But it's never the point of the sale for me. The point is: did I get what I want? Recently, I think I found another point, when it ...