Night Owl Cards

We've reached the part of the baseball card release calendar that I've started calling "The Dead Zone". After Topps flagship and Heritage comes a number of products that don't appeal to me and I wouldn't miss if they disappeared. Opening Day is redundant. Panini Donruss is incomplete and often incompetent. Gypsy Queen is too expensive for really ugly cards. After that, I believe, is Bowman, which means less to me than the three other sets I just mentioned. It's a long gap between Heritage and the return of stuff I I'm interested in, like Series 2 and Allen and Ginter. A whole season goes by before Series 2 shows up in June and A&G appears at some point in the summer. That's quite the wait. And although I'm more immersed in vintage and other non-current collection pursuits than ever, it's weird to go so long without sampling some cards. It's been three weeks since I've sampled from my local Target or Walmart. So, t...

Yesterday, I was reminded again that Melvin Upton Jr. is a Blue Jay. It's difficult to keep track these days as players seem to be change scenery more and more often. And in this very "life goes too fast" year of 2016, I'm in a perpetual state of catch-up. It doesn't help that players like Melvin Upton Jr. are on a new team each year. It doesn't help that players like Melvin Upton Jr. didn't even have the same name he did less than two years ago! Yes, Melvin Upton Jr. started out on very different terms not so long ago. He played for a team formerly known as the Devil Rays. And Upton was formerly known as "B.J." That transition was marked by Topps in 2015, with a card in flagship and a card in Update: And a very helpful notation of the name change on the back of the Update card: That got me thinking about other name changes. I'm not referring to wholesale name changes, like David Arias transforming into David Ortiz,...