Night Owl Cards

(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 ...

I am not a dedicated player collector because it doesn't fit into how I view baseball and how my collection reflects the history of baseball. Set collecting and team collecting, I believe, do a better job of telling you what's going on in the sport in any given year. And that's important to me. During my less kind moments, I consider player collecting "stalker-ish," but I do see the value in gathering cards of specific players. I do it myself, but it's a low-key pursuit. There is no drive behind it and no real goals. The fact is, I do admire certain players instinctively or subconsciously, players who never played for my favorite team. So, when Jeff of Wax Pack Wonders offered one of his latest giveaways, presented in a very player-collector friendly format, I actually took part, and I didn't pick exclusively Dodgers either. (Confession time: I didn't pick exclusively Dodgers because my Dodgers collection is a bit, shall we say, "advan...

Lots of things to address lately, but as usual, I am ill-prepared. So let me address, instead, the jumble of cards on the desk that I have received over the last month. It's such a jumble that I am beginning to lose track of who sent what. And that means if you've been an extremely busy bee at sending out packages -- like Jeff of 2 by 3 Heroes -- then it's a guarantee that I'm going to mess up something that you shipped out. Nothing tragic, mind you. I just can't figure out whether Jeff has sent me two packages or three packages in the last three weeks. First-world problems, I know. I was going through the disheveled stack -- with cards angled in different directions in a vain attempt to alert future me that "here begins a completely new package that he sent" -- trying to determine if he once, twice, three times sent me a package. I've finally settled on three times -- which is probably wrong, but it gives me the opportunity to force that terr...