Night Owl Cards

I haven't noticed many repacks dangling from card displays over the last few months. I don't know if it's my less frequent trips to the usual retail outlets or if the Fairfield people are taking a breather. But I've missed them -- a lot. Target always has repacks, but lately they've been trying to force those $19.99 repacks on me, and I'm not paying 20 bucks in one shot on big-box store cards ever again. Meanwhile, Walmart I don't think has offered a repack since 1973. But I was in Rite Aid a week or two ago and spotted one of those "100 cards for $5.99" boxes hanging from the lowest hook on the display. It looked lonely. So I brought it home. The repack repaid me immediately with the above spectacular night card. These night cards from the '70s/early '80s are my favorites and any time I unearth any card from this period that I have never seen before, the box is automatically a bargain. Mick Kelleher was easily the star of the sh...

Cards ceased to exist as I knew them in 1989. Actually, it probably happened in 1985 when Topps issued the U.S. Olympic team set. But that was a subset, which was grouped together and featured a design that differed from the base cards. In 1989, Topps presented 10 cards of players -- who knows WHO they were -- in their college or (lordy, what is this? ) their high school uniforms. And Topps didn't have the courtesy to group them together as their own subset or create a whole new design for them. No, they dispersed them into the base set as if they were regular major league players. Topps noted a difference only with a "draft pick" logo in the corner. Also by selecting 10 players, Topps didn't even have the forethought to consider the legions of collectors who used nine-pocket pages for their collection. So, even if they wanted to separate the NON-major leaguers from the other cards in the set, they couldn't. It would look like this: No place for Robin ...