Night Owl Cards

  I've written many times about how I adore Kellogg's 3-D sets from the '70s and early '80s. They are my favorite oddball and food issue of all-time, born out of childhood and breakfast mornings staring at the back of cereal boxes. I love them. And they're breaking my heart. Not only have I been struggling to acquire new ones the last year-and-a-half due to the rise in prices on those cards that previously no one wanted, but their brittle nature is causing me to question whether it's worth it to pursue them anymore. An example: I discovered this cracked 1976 Kellogg's Reggie Jackson in my box of Kellogg's cards a few months ago. I was crushed. The '76 set is complete and just about every one is pristine, there's only one that I can think of that has some wear and yellowing. Nothing has cracks. I just love the beautiful white borders contrasting with the red-and-blue stripes on this set. But cracks -- oh, no -- that's all I see. The other rea...

(For the first time since March, readership numbers went up in July, breaking the year-long downward trend. But it's August now, a traditional low readership month, so might as well lean into it and restart one of my least read features! It's time for Cardboard Appreciation. This is the 313th in a series): Without realizing it, I've been doing well in adding Carl Yastrzemski cards to my collection. Nothing nuts or anything (heck, I already have his rookie card), but it's nice to officially have his 1970s Topps cards out of the way with this particular one. I nabbed this card in another Twitter sale from @Tec872 as I continue to chase the '70 set. It occurs to me that Yaz is one of those players who never competed for the Dodgers that I will absolutely hang on to his cards as if he did. I know this is probably a common thing for people more accustomed to player collecting or those who grew up in the '80s and had to have every Bo Jackson card, whether he played f...

  It's been a frustrating year for collecting the kind of cards I like collecting. I've eased up on my vintage interests because there's no sense paying those prices. I'm hoping they'll settle back to normal in the coming months or maybe years (ack!), but for now those are not hard-charging needs. The same with Kellogg's cards from the '70s, which practically break my heart. It wasn't even 3 or 4 years ago when dealers were close to begging me to take them at card shows and now try finding one of the stars from those sets uncracked for under 20 bucks.   I experienced first-hand this sticker shock after an accident in my card room a few weeks ago.   I store my completed Kellogg's sets in stacks of top-loaders atop a shelf, out of the sunlight. There's probably a better place for them but I like that I don't have to move them because moving leads to ruin when 3-D cards are involved. I probably should get them in one of those card storage boxes ...

  More than eight years ago (lordy, 2013 is eight years ago??? ), I wrapped up a series where I looked through the Baseball Card Magazines from when I subscribed to it between 1982-85.   I loved doing that series and was sad when I ran out of issues. But just yesterday I realized I hadn't explored all of the issues that I owned.   The April 1984 issue that you see here I used to kick off the series in 2011. But all I did in that post was make fun of people wrote to the letters section hoping the supposed errors on their cards (some weren't even errors) were going to make them rich.   I didn't bother scanning the rest of the issue like I did with all the other ones to follow. So I'm going to go through that now! It's like when you subscribed to a magazine for a year and they gave you a bonus issue before your subscription ran out!   OK, you saw the cover and what was in store as far as teased articles. Here is another peak with the index at the front of the mag...

  I decided to go a little deeper into my calculating of which players have the most cards in my collection. I wanted to further illustrate how dominant the late '90s/early '00s are when you're totaling up something like this. I also wanted to see who the top five non-Dodgers are in my collection, going beyond Nolan Ryan and George Brett. When you look deeper into numbers, that's when you catch mistakes. It turns out George Brett doesn't have the second-highest number of cards in my collection among players who haven't played for the Dodgers.   I somehow overlooked Reggie Jackson, who, of course, should have a lot of cards in my collection. I have 106 Reggie Jacksons, which is more than the 98 George Bretts.   The other mistake was in mentioning that Ron Cey was 37th on the list. He's actually 38th. I missed Roy Campanella. He appears in 143 cards in my collection, three more than Cey. Much like Jackie Robinson, precious few of the Campanellas in my collecti...