Night Owl Cards

  The other day I received one of those pink postage-due-your-cards-are-waiting-for-you-way-down-at-the-post-office slips.   I always go and pay the postage because CARDS, and even being down to one vehicle -- that also needs work done kind of immediately -- wasn't going to stop me. It was a little surprising how much "postage due" has gone up for simple PWE, but after seeing the contents, I was happy I made the effort.   The cards arrived from reader Casey, all 13 of them stuffed into that one envelope, and some required extra protection, too. But this wasn't 1991 Donruss, or even the average modern cards I usually receive. Certainly worth the cost.     I'll start with one of the many parallels in products these days. This is one of the acceptable ones because it involves color, and also I'm always grateful when someone sends me an Ohtani card.     My first team logo border parallel. I've seen plenty of these online over the last couple of years but n...

  My first sportlots order of the year has been sitting on my rolltop desk waiting for me to brag about it.   It's not bragging material, really. There were a lot of upgrades that I don't need to show, but I sure did enjoy getting that 1977 Topps Joel Youngblood to replace the creased one in the set binder that I didn't even know was creased until a rare day of sunshine came through the card room (who knows how many creased cards are hiding in the Northeastern darkness of my home).   Some stuff has been put away already and others have been sitting in a stack waiting until the one last pokey sportlots seller finally snapped out his stupor and shipped the last card (this always happens).    I've determined what my 10 favorite arrivals are -- but there are more than 10 cards. Per usual, these are interesting mostly to me and could very well bore you to tears.      10. Gavin Lux, 2020 Topps Chrome   The last card needed for the team set. Can you...

  Last Friday, the baseball socials and various "topical" sports websites were abuzz about MLB's shrinking ballplayers.   Since MLB is implementing the ABS (Automated Balls/Strikes System) this season, the league remeasured players to get more exact figures to feed into the computer. That resulted in a lot of players' official heights changing.   Gavin Lux sort of became the unofficial representative of the change in ballplayers' heights. Lux went from 6-foot-2 to 5-foot-11. I admit, I don't notice players' heights much but if someone told me when Lux was on the Dodgers that he was 6-2, I would have laughed. Not what my eyes were telling me when watching him in a game.   This info is all well and good but naturally I wanted to know how this played out on baseball cards. Did the vital stats on the backs change from 2025 to 2026? Immediately, the answer was "yes." Lux does not have a 2026 Topps flagship card yet, but he does have a Heritage card (o...

  A couple weeks ago, I noticed yet another downturn in card blogging, and I went through my blog reading list to determine how many card bloggers posted at least once a week for the previous week.   It was around 40. That seemed like an all-time low ... or at least since the early days of my blog when I'm sure there weren't even 40 card blogs.   I just checked again, and the numbers were still low, but better this time at just over 50 posting at least once a week.   I'm grateful for anyone who writes about cards at least once a week. Reading card blogs has been a daily ritual for me for more than 17 years and I would hate to move on from that. I don't know how the people who used to regularly read card blogs stopped, frankly. Don't they feel like there's a hole in their day every day?   The amount of card bloggers who write at least once a week and trade through the mail regularly is even less. Much less. But two who still do both just sent me some cards. That ...

  Today is the fifth anniversary of the Dodgers' trade with the Red Sox in which the Dodgers gained Mookie Betts for a bag of beans.   It's not a coincidence that at around the same time, Betts has moved into the top 10 in terms of the number of cards in my collection. Two World Series wins with one of MLB's flagship teams and being a hell of a bowler will do that. He's now at No. 10, according to TCDB, with 373 cards, knocking Adrian Beltre to 11th.   It seems that Betts arrived in the top 10 extremely quick. Sure, it took five years, but there are plenty of other players in my collection who are favorites, who I've been collecting for a long time, and are nowhere near the top 10.   But if you are a star during this era of collecting baseball cards, you are going to make up ground fast. Companies now issue way too many cards of the top five percent of ball players. It makes it much easier to reach the top than it ever has been. Just for my own funzies, I thought I...

  I've been teasing the big box Johnny's Trading Spot sent for a couple of posts now, but now it's time to get everything out of the way. There is so much here that it will still take me a couple of weeks to get it all into my collection -- or into the dupes pile where half of it will go. Here are the two stacks of mostly needs after all the dupes had been filtered. The Dodgers and a few random baseball cards are on the left, the Bills are on the right. As I've mentioned before, I don't really collect Bills cards anymore, save for the ones when I was covering the team (junk wax era, basically) and earlier stuff from '70s and '60s. I've even stopped with the current Bills cards, there are just too much and pro football cards' obsession with shiny is just not doing it for me. So who knows what I'll do with that stack on the right. But let's focus on WHAT I NEED.   Non-Dodgers stuff first. These are all the 2023 Allen & Ginter cards I neede...