Night Owl Cards

I was going through some posts on my blog from May of 2010 the other day when the total number of posts written that month caught my eye. I wrote 44 posts that month. This is not a surprise to me. I know I used to post to Night Owl Cards twice a day as often as I could and averaged 40 posts a month. But when my old habits hit me out of the blue like that, I am stunned. What kind of cyborg was I? This May, I will have written 16 posts. This is post 16. That is one more than my record low for posts in a month, which happened twice last year. Some may think I have gotten too "big" for this blog. Life is far busier due to my family health issues. Also there's the matter of writing for Beckett magazine. "Perhaps Mr. Big Shot Night Owl doesn't have the need for this particular writing exercise anymore? Perhaps he can't be bothered with those blog basics: trading, updating want lists, boasting about card acquisitions, etc?" Well, maybe. But I'm g...

I had a tiny little bit of Christmas money leftover after my junk wax team set binge. It was just enough to grab a couple more cards, so I looked up which team set featured only a couple of wants and settled on a favorite: 1993 Select. I needed just two Dodgers to complete Select, the upscale brother of Score, and now they are mine. Yup, I needed a couple of Erics. I'm very pleased to have another team set from the early '90s completed, but particularly one like '93 Select. I've been a fan of this set from way back on this blog and in the unlikely event that I decide to start completing sets from the 1990s, this will be in the top 5, easily. I've always liked the look. Green sets normally don't do anything for me, but I enjoy the design and it's one of those sets with good photos that are not sacrificed for design. And just as important: it does not sacrifice design for the photos. But without further babbling about my likes and dislikes, her...

If you have some knowledge about cards from the 1980s -- particularly the most featured cards from the 1980s -- then this card, even if you have no idea who Bob Pate is, probably looks vaguely familiar to you. It is a card that leads to the "Coral Snake Effect". I didn't make up that term. It was mentioned on my 1985 Topps blog by hiflew from Cards from the Quarry . And it didn't have to do with this 1981 Donruss card of Bob Pate, it had to do with this card: Yeah, I know, "who the hell is Keefe Cato?" You've got to read my '85 Topps blog and then you'll know. But this post isn't merely about nobody ballplayers. It's about how these players resemble someone else much more well-known in the set. In hiflew's and Keefe Cato's case it is the Eric Davis rookie card. They don't really look like each other, but they share some other characteristics. They're both Reds, they're both featured cropped at the c...

Before I go back in time, here is the 2015 Topps Series 1 checklist , which was released today. My quick reaction to it is: Lot of the same stuff we've seen in recent years. ... Kershaw has to stop hogging awards so I can stop collecting those league leaders things with guys I don't care about. ... Oh, look, Derek Jeter is card No. 1 in the set, that will cause people to flip out -- oops, they already did. ... The inserts have card numbers (instead of letters) on them again --- weeeeee! ... The first-pitch insert is interesting in a D-list celebrity kind of way. But real reaction will have to come when the cards hit store shelves near me. Right now, today's excitement came in the haul that arrived at my doorstep this afternoon. I made it a mission to clear out as many junk wax-era Dodgers sets as I could. I have no desire to continue chasing cards from this time period. It's not particularly memorable for me and the cards are far too plentiful for me to still n...