Night Owl Cards

  These are bizarre words for me to write but this year marks 50 years since I first held baseball cards in my hand. Those cards were 1974 Topps baseball cards. Had Heritage not been so scared to begin with Topps' first real baseball set when it kicked off the brand in 2001, we'd be celebrating my 50 years with the '74 design in Heritage. Full circle! But Heritage has been out of kilter ever since and I need to take a time-out every time I try to figure out which set Heritage will be replicating in the 2030s when it should take milliseconds. Heritage did the '74 thing last year and the design means so much to me that I completed the whole thing despite last year ending in a "3". It's such a classic set that I started with 50 years ago -- even though I chucked those cards at the end of the summer. I used the Eddie Leon card as a post-topper once before, quite awhile ago (I like that post , most of what I wrote in there still applies). It's one of those ...

One of the best parts of card collecting, for me, is that it connects me with my childhood. I can't imagine what it would be like to collect as an adult but not as a kid. That's such a weird concept. For those of you who are in touch with your inner child (there are too few of those people, I believe), you probably have cards in which the very sight of them takes you back to what you felt, heard and saw when you had that card as a kid. It is a major emotional rush. At least it is for me. I have replayed those cardboard emotions in my head so many times that the actual moment is often lost, clouded by a series of memories repeated by a 40-year-old man. Fortunately, there are still triggers that will take me immediately to my childhood days. For each of the five senses, I can think of one particular instance that will tap into my 10-year-old self and everything that I was thinking at the time. Here they are: 1. Taste: An Oscar Mayer baloney sandwic...