Night Owl Cards

This is the first card I pulled out of a pack of 1977 Topps cards. It was a rack pack. My dad bought it for me from a store on the other side of town. The store was a couple blocks down from a hospital. We were coming home from visiting my mom there. I don't remember why she was in the hospital. It wasn't anything major, because I don't remember feeling alarmed or anything. In fact, I remember the entire ride home as a very pleasant, comforting experience. Just me and my rack pack of brand, new 1977 cards. It was going to be a heck of a collecting season, what with me pulling a Dodger in my very first card out of a pack. And it turned out to be a terrific collecting season. One of the best. I've recounted it once or twice . Probably more. The way I collected cards that year -- the communal nature of the collecting process during that season -- makes the 1977 set very special to me. It is why it is the next set I am collecting during my bid to complete all of ...

Today, when we talk about Topps and it not being up-front with its customers, we talk about "the gimmick," in all of its various forms of sneakery. But Topps isn't new to the deception game. Back in the day, sneakery came in the form of the photo on the front of the baseball card. I'm not talking about mere airbrushing. I'm talking about Topps creating photographs for cards of events that never happened . Take two examples from a year in Topps history that features countless examples of bizarre photography, 1973. Many of you know some of these beautiful disasters by heart. There's the Frank Robinson card ... ... In which the only finger Topps lifted in order to celebrate Robinson's arrival with the California Angels was to white-out the word Dodgers across his jersey. "They'll never be able to tell!" the graphics people chortled, forgetting that the Dodgers wear one of the most recognizable uniforms in baseball and that their stadium ...