Night Owl Cards

What would you do if you had that fully stocked Target card aisle that featured the very most up-to-date card product that you've read that other collectors have? What would you do if you had one of those monthly card shows that you hear about from other places? What would you do if you had a card shop just down the road, like some lucky people? What would you do if you could drive easily to a flea market once a week or a month? I know what I would do. I'd be at that card aisle every day. I'd have a collection you wouldn't believe because I'm at a card show once a month. I'd be sharing vacation pictures with the card shop owner because I'd be there so often. And I would be able to drive to that flea market blindfolded because I knew the route so well. But would you? Really? Or is that just jealousy talking? Here is what I mean. A couple of days ago, I read a post on I Love the Smell of Cardboard in the Morning . Tim apparently lives in that...

It's been quite awhile since a Topps insert set interested me enough to collect it. This shouldn't be the case because I could think of about 15 fascinating insert sets in the next 15 minutes. It probably has to do with licensing or getting enough Babe Ruth cards in the set. One insert set that did interest me quite a bit was the Tales Of The Game set from 2010 Topps. It featured terrific subject matter spanning the entire history of the game and only a few ulterior motives (Mantle card, littered with Yankees and Red Sox). I completed the full 25-card set , but just in case you weren't around then or you have sort of aversion to clicking links, I've gone through the trouble to show them here again for you now:   It's not a perfect set, but because of the sheer variety of famous moments, I'm willing to overlook its drawbacks, and I still love going through these cards in a binder. Topps added a "M...

It's been very busy again and I've done a lot of postponing this week. Anything that takes more time than a blog post, that is not a matter of life and death, has been pushed to the end of the week or next week. That, unfortunately, has included card packages. The good news is that I have a few days to myself coming up and I plan to devote them to various household projects. And one of those projects is revisiting my card binders. (What? You thought I was putting on a new roof?) I visit my card binders a lot. Pretty much every day, in fact. But I don't visit them in the way that I want. It's usually a hurried spin through the pages to find the card or cards that I need and then throwing the binders back where they belong -- if I have time. Otherwise, I'll leave them on the floor to trip over the next time. But my binders deserve to be treated in the way that God intended. They deserve to be opened at a collector's leisure. They deserve to have th...

Yesterday I read It's Like Having My Own Card Shop explain the reasoning for his blog name. (He's having a contest, check it out ). It was a tale of a glorious childhood in which there were five card shops within 10 minutes of his home. He used to spend hours at the card shop. But later, as we've all experienced, life took over and the number of card shops dwindled, and now we're all online trying to recapture that local card shop experience. Well, some of us are anyway. I'm not, because I never had that card shop experience. This is probably why I have had so much trouble with my current card shop in the past and with most card shops that I have encountered. But I know this is a very, very, very small sample size because quite honestly, I've never been in a situation that was described by Daniel in It's Like Having My Own Card Shop. My childhood LCS experience was limited to one visit to one card shop. I grew up in a small city about 3 ho...

Baseball is tough to figure out. Yet we keep trying to figure it out. We offer up preseason predictions. They're almost always wrong. We declare teams dead for the season in May. We're usually wrong there, too (see: Dodgers). Earlier this afternoon, I proclaimed Hanley Ramirez as the best player I've seen this year after he scorched yet another home run. And then he made a really stupid fielding error. Baseball is always trolling us. Remember when people scoffed at comparisons between Clayton Kershaw and Sandy Koufax? Now Kershaw has the lowest ERA in the first 1,000 innings of his career out of anyone in history. Even better than Koufax. Remember when Ramirez was dealt to the Marlins in exchange for Josh Beckett (and Mike Lowell) and the trade was described as "a great deal for the Red Sox," and then later "a great deal for the Marlins" and then later, "a trade that benefited both teams"? Remember when Andre Ethier hit 31 hom...