Night Owl Cards

  Like many collectors I am completely over relic cards. When searching for a card I want, I'm never looking for a relic card. I don't list them among my wants, I don't consider them when I'm looking to complete a team set. To a slightly less degree, the same goes for autograph cards. I do search for them on occasion, but very rarely is it a card quest of mine. There isn't a single set issued today in which I'll say "ooh, I want that autograph."   My collecting background does not include chasing hits, so this is pretty much par for the course for me, but they're even more irrelevant than ever to me.   So when Johnny's Trading Spot shipped me two long boxes of Dodgers, about 75 of which contained cards with scribbles or embedded with cloth bits, my brain stared at them for a bit. Sure, some I really liked, but a bunch I honestly don't know what I'll do with them. For now, the best thing they're good for is a blog post. I went throu...

I used to take Thanksgiving week off from work. This was my ritual for years, an entire two full decades practically. I'm no longer comfortable doing that. Within the last few years, there have been two developments in my job that have made vacations at this time of the year almost impossible. 1. Basketball season starts earlier 2. Football season ends later Come on, high school sports, rein it in. I now spend the Thanksgiving period working on the special high school basketball preview section. Out of all of the seasonal sports preview sections we produce, the basketball one is always the most rushed and hectic, thanks to the aforementioned Thanksgiving holiday and high school football's refusal to let go. The rest of my week will be occupied by the very demanding football. Our area high school football teams continue to perform better and better in state play. Once, and for many years, high school football season ended in my area around the first weekend o...

Even though I've only recently announced my more focused emphasis on set collecting and easing up a bit on the Dodgers completion quest, it's still been quite awhile since I've spent meaningful time with my Dodgers binders. There are a couple of stacks of Dodger cards waiting to enter those hallowed binders. I usually update them after the most recent card show (at only 2 or 3 shows a year, it works out well). But after the last show in October, I didn't bother. So, they wait. Also, it has been awhile since I received a card package like the one that was sent recently by cynicalbuddha at Collector's Crack . This was exclusively Dodgers, and mostly ones from that decade or so when I wasn't collecting. I used to receive packages like this on the regular. It would make me flock to my binders to check whether I needed the cards. Then, since my knowledge of that time has always been limited, I'd have to check them again, because I can't retain anythi...

With the arrival of an envelope from GCA of The Collective Mind , I finally completed the 2018 Topps flagship Dodgers team set. Kyle Farmer was a tricky little devil. I don't know what it was. Maybe that semi-rare "C/3B" designation. But it doesn't matter because all 31 cards in this year's team set are present. At 31 cards this is one of the largest Dodgers team sets for Topps of all-time. Based on the research I did a little while ago , it ranks in the top 10, tied with 1964, 1972, 1986 and 1987 for sixth place. Although this seems admirable, there is quite a bit of bloat in the 2018 team set, which accounts for the large number. Because Topps went to league leader cards that feature just one player, they are now part of the team set. Take out all those "extras" -- including the random checklist card -- and the Dodgers' team set falls to 25 cards. Here is a look at the set: If I were to apply my Joy of a Team Set breakdown to...