Night Owl Cards

   Like several other bloggers I received a nice care package from Bob of the best bubble a couple of weeks ago.   I'm just getting to it because -- yes, life has reared its ugly head again. But also it took me a number of days to figure out exactly what I had once I spilled the contents. Lots of oddball stuff and other items I don't come across every day.   I'll separate these into "STUFF I KNOW," "STUFF I FIGURED OUT" and "STUFF I STILL DON'T KNOW WHAT IT IS".     * STUFF I KNOW*   Yes, I know this is a 1996 Finest card. I have it already. But I've suckered myself into collecting both the cards with the coating intact and the ones with it removed. I need help.     A 2013 Gypsy Queen mini of former Dodgers reliever Paco Rodriguez. 2013 was the year for Paco Rodriguez cards. Rodriguez last pitched in the majors 11 years ago and he's now 35. We're all old.       Another Dover reprint card for the collection of one of my pre-war...

(Greetings on one of the busiest travel weekends of the year. I tried traveling this weekend about 20 years ago. It was awful. I vowed never to do it again. And I haven't. It's time for Cardboard Appreciation. From the comfort of my home. This is the 306th in a series):   When I last visited this card, I was showing off the 868 versions of it that I had received from Dodgers fan and former 1992 Upper Deck Eric Karros hoarder, Rob . I haven't thought about the card, or how many copies of it that I still own, all that much in the last six years. I did give away a handful not long after receiving them. But the vast majority have been sitting in a couple of long boxes (one won't do the trick) in a closet for all of these years. However, I took them out last week when someone on Twitter asked "what's the most of a single card that you own?" I've met a lot of card hoarders in my time online and I expected a bunch of people to show off entire binders of the...

That is only slightly larger than actual size. One of the more amusing aspects of the baseball card boom of the late 1980s and early 1990s was the lengths collectors would go to Protect Their Investment. One of those tributes to that era of paranoia is the monster screwdown case. I don't even know if it has a proper name. Maybe this is the half-inch screwdown? I do know that it measures 3 3/4-by-5 3/4 inches, which is far too much acreage for a baseball card. A very fine signed 1993 Stadium Club Team Eric Karros card arrived encased in the amusing monster screwdown case (AMSC) from Paul at Scribbled Ink . I've never understood the extra space devoted to these AMSCs. They don't feature a stand on the back so it's not easily displayed on a desk, etc. I'm not sure why it's so big, perhaps to double as a weapon? I have very few cards in screwdown cases and almost all of them are in the much smaller ones that I prefer. This is the perfect size for a...

I picked a strange year to fully rejoin the modern collecting scene. My return was in 2006, but I didn't realize all that was out there until 2008, when this blog started. And, 2008 -- how do I describe 2008? It wasn't the greatest year for cards. Oh, I'm sure some are nostalgic for it. Upper Deck was still around. You could get presidential people on your cards if you liked that kind of thing. But, damn, there were some weird sets. Upper Deck Documentary. Topps Moments and Milestones. Upper Deck Spectrum. Upper Deck Yankee Stadium Legacy. And the set that I still haven't figured out: Topps Co-Signers. Since I am a poor, retail-bound collector -- and was even more so in 2008 -- I don't get a handle on hobby-issue sets. They're strange and unfamiliar. But Co-Signers made it particularly difficult to comprehend for a plebeian like me. Any Co-Signers cards I received were the box-breakers' "discards," such as that really ugly Brad Penny c...