Night Owl Cards

  As of this week, the final envelope from the 5,000-post, 5,000-card giveaway reached its destination. I'm done sending out those 250-card random repacks and done paying the postage. Best of all, I can actually use the card table for writing and sorting again, something that was impossible with 5,000 cards sitting on it. Giving away 5,000 cards from my collection helped clear out a ton of cards that didn't have any place in my collection and that I was holding onto unnecessarily. I am now free of a whole lot of card clutter (although there are some leftovers from the giveaway that will return to my collection). My fear with this giveaway is that I would deplete my trade bait down to nothing, and it's true, I don't have a heck of a lot of it right now. But it won't take long to build that back up. I give it a month. I still have one small giveaway-related package to send -- to Chris of The Collector -- just kind of a thank you for inspiring a little bit of levity d...

  A couple days ago, Collecting Cutch informed me that it was National Sunglasses Day. I was out of town, so I didn't get the memo. I also didn't get the chance to post about sunglasses on baseball cards that day. So this is me being not-so-timely with a Blog Bat-Around type of post. I wanted to see how prevalent sunglass-wearers were on baseball cards today, by looking at the last 10 years of Dodgers cards in my collection. It turns out they aren't all that common. I'm not sure why. Maybe it's because card companies want to make sure faces are shown? I just know that sunglasses show up a lot in baseball games I watch, especially in the outfield. I know that I use sunglasses just about every day during the summer (sometimes in the winter, too) and it's got to be standard equipment for people working outside, looking up into the sky. So, anyway, here are the five most recent Dodger cards I found with sunglasses worn. Justin Turner, 2021 Topps Mookie Betts, box-t...

Even though the PWE has become much more prevalent in card exchanges through the mail -- who can afford postage prices anymore -- I still see a bit of attitude about it from time to time. Mostly this is in reference to ebay sellers and their lame packaging. Those complainers have a point sometimes. But other times I look at it and think, "it's a plain, white envelope. That's perfectly legitimate for one card." PWE's can pack a surprising punch. Also, there's something meaningful about a PWE that other packaging doesn't possess: "Here's something that I found just for you -- one card -- and I just had to send it." I received three such PWE's recently. One of them contained the card above. It came from R.C. , who got in on Topps' online 3-D promotion before the cards sold out. The 3-D effect is almost impossible to show on a scan, and I don't do gifs, but, trust me, it's quite effective. It has an updated Sportflics...

On the day after Christmas, I backed out of the driveway, turned to my right, and spotted a Christmas tree in a snowbank in front of a neighbor's house. This always depresses me. I hope that people who dispose of their tree the second it's not Christmas day have an allergy problem or the tree was a firetrap or something rational other than "I'm done with Christmas, bring on the dullest part of the year!!!" I'm one of those loonies who wants Christmas to last forever, or at least the 12 days that are sung about in the song. I want my ladies dancing and drummers drumming. Right now, for me, is the Christmas season. There are still Christmas cookies in the house, lights shining outside and those cloying Lifetime Christmas movies airing around the clock. Properly extending the Christmas season also gives me the perfect excuse to show some festive packages that were sent with the spirit of the season in mind that I mostly received before Christmas. For e...

The Dodgers are doing something that is very difficult to do. I don't necessarily mean all the games they're winning. I mean that they are repeatedly getting all the attention in the newspaper for which I work. Normally, our newspaper sports section, when it comes to baseball, is all about the Yankees and Mets. This makes me extraordinarily sad, but I get it. I live in New York, people in New York, for some bizarre reason, like the Yankees and Mets. So they dominate coverage here. The Dodgers are almost always ignored. However, this year, they are repeatedly leading the baseball roundup. There are more photos of them in the section than I ever remember in over 20 years of doing this job. And, in today's sports section, they showed up on the cover, with a very large photo. Of course, that large photo was of Rich Hill, and the news wasn't good if you're a Dodger fan. Hill pitched a no-hitter for nine innings, but lost the game 1-0 when he gave up a barely...