Night Owl Cards

  It hit 90 degrees today. I'm not someone who is bothered by the heat, but once it's 90 I take notice. It's not super rare around here -- I'd say we're in the 90s about 5 times a year -- but I was still tempted to stay inside.   Fortunately I didn't.   I was in a yank to get to the monthly card show. I've been frustrated lately by the lagging arrival of my online card purchases the last couple of weeks. I don't know if this is a traditional July thing (sellers and postal workers on vacation), but shipments are not appearing on the days I was told. Also, I have received back-to-back postage-due slips on orders, which seems a little outrageous.   So it was one of those times where I thought "I can't get anyone to send me my cards, I'm going to go get them myself ." Crank the AC, I'm coming for you, show!   I had no expectations for this show. With just five 1969 Topps cards needed, and none of them available the last time I visited, ...

  Just a few minor things to mention today, nothing that will appeal much on its own. Readers seem to be catching up on outside time anyway. I took a look at my two stacks of 2024 Topps flagship sitting on my card desk and they looked pretty high. That inspired me to add my wants to TCDB and, in a flash, I'm down to the final 40 cards to finish the set. I barely had to lift a finger, except to search for the cards requested in exchange, which always can be fraught with peril. My remaining wants are on TCDB but I'll put them here as well. Per usual, guys like Elly De La Cruz and Aaron Judge aren't popping up in trades. Topps couldn't possibly double-print those guys now could it? So here's the list ( List edited as of 9/8) : 141 - Elly De La Cruz, 375 - Matt Vierling, 442- Shota Imanaga, 593 - Carlos Rodon, Wilyer Abreu, 695 - Kyle Gibson Also I haven't accounted for needing a second Dodger card for Series 2 on TCDB so add 492 - J.D. Martinez, 500 - Shohei Ohtani...

  I've been trying to think of the last time there was a card show where I live. It's been quite a few years and my memory is not good at picking out dates from that long ago. Back when I first moved into town, in 1994, there were regular shows at the state office building downtown. I went to a couple of those. This was just before I got out of the hobby and by then there could have been shows every week, I never would have known, because I didn't care. When I returned to collecting about 10 years later, I remember going to a show at the same place. But then those shows stopped and I don't remember another one until a couple years later at the community college. I recall going there and buying one card. I think it was the 1971 Topps Ernie Banks, to replace the one I had just traded away. I think that show was about 2005 or 2006. There hasn't been a show around here ever since, thus my hour-plus journeys to find people selling cards in a communal setting. So, a coupl...

  Is this a new series? I think it might be. I was attempting to hunt down a new angle for the "Joy of a Team Set" series a week or two ago, but I'm starting to feel like I've run out of ideas for that series. I'm not going to end it, I may have just hit a temporary snag, but I thought I'd go in a slightly different direction. I've praised the common, ordinary subset many times on this blog and have devoted a full post to individual ones here and there. I've even written a magazine article focused on them. Subsets seem like a fad of the past, with inserts taking over in the mid-to-late '90s. But the subset still appears periodically. However, I don't count a group of cards as subsets if they are not numbered consecutively in a set. That's the first rule of defining a subset. (Topps, start grouping your league leader cards together again, please). Subsets have been part of main sets since the 1950s, probably longer. During the '50s and ...

  I've told the first part of this story a few times, but not the second part.   I'm fairly certain that my first glimpse of Henry Aaron came when I opened the pack that I had shoplifted from the end cap of a local drug store when I was 9 years old.   It was 1975 and all I knew of television programming were cartoons and Oscar the Grouch. I wasn't watching baseball games yet and I certainly wasn't reading newspapers. But I knew the name Hank Aaron. Maybe my classmates mentioned him or maybe my third-grade teacher brought him up when he broke the home run record. That's the kind of impact he made at the time. So when I opened that pilfered pack as the guilt washed over me, I knew who Aaron was. I knew he was the best player in the pack. I knew he had broken the record. Whose record, I had no idea. But that Aaron, he is probably the first baseball player I ever knew. I pretended that I had found the pack of cards on the sidewalk a few houses down from where I lived. A...

Even though I have been collecting the 1956 Topps set for more than a decade now, the pursuit has never felt real to me. I wouldn't even be collecting this set if I didn't receive a jump-start back in the early 1980s when my dad brought home a grocery bag filled with mid-1950s baseball cards, mostly 1956, that he received from a co-worker. I ended up with around 110 cards from the set without doing a thing. Although I didn't add a single card to that stash for years, I held on to them and always thought "someday." Then, over the past dozen years, as I added a card here and there and fellow collectors sent me a card here and there, I became acquainted with exactly what I needed to do to truly commit to collecting the set. I would need to buy cards of legends who I had only read about in books and magazines. Mantle, Mays, Koufax, Williams, Clemente, Berra. Just ridiculous cards. So the set was always "up there" and "out there," and I cou...