Night Owl Cards

  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'm not a Mets fan or a Cardinals fan. I'm not much for having favorites on teams that aren't the Dodgers either. But I can make a case for admiring Tom Seaver and Lou Brock during their careers. Not only were they giants of baseball during the very first years that I collected cards but I still own a couple of meaningful memorabilia items for each recently departed player and that is very rare for me for anyone who is not a Dodger player. This is the first baseball glove I ever owned. It's a Tom Seaver model. Long ago, it used to feature Tom Seaver's signature in the palm, and when I received it, I immediately changed my favorite team to the Mets and my favorite player to Tom Seaver. That lasted all of one day before I knocked some sense into myself. I received this glove for my birthday and, yes, it was the Bicentennial that year, how can you tell? Every last item selling in stores in 1976 was red, white and blue (take it from me, the red, white and bl...

Have you ever come across a terrific factoid for the first time and wondered why no one else has discovered it already and then realize you've misread or misinterpreted something and that's why no one has discovered it? Because it doesn't exist, dumb-ass? Oh, if I had baseball card for how many times that's happened. The most recent example came a week or so ago as I was filing away some unwanted 2016 Topps into a box to hopefully never pull out again (except if someone wants them, please, please take them). I came across Caleb Cotham here. I had no idea who Caleb Cotham is. I stopped watching the YES Network about three years ago in an effort to know much less about the Yankees. Since first coming across the card I've realized there isn't a lot to know, he was traded to the Reds after just 12 games in the Aroldis Chapman deal and then struggled with Cincinnati for 20-plus games in 2016 before becoming a free agent. In my ignorance, I misread the name...

I do a pretty good job of coming up with thoughtful posts when I don't have a lot of time. But there are times when I have no time and I just don't feel like digging deep. Today was one of those days. I was randomly looking through past posts, looking for some kind of easy inspiration but not really expecting it. I settled on one post from about a year ago in which I showed the above unopened package of 1989 Baseball Talk cards. It has remained unopened in my collection since that time. With no Baseball Talk "record player" and the Kirk Gibson card already in my possession, I had no incentive to open it ... until now. A lot of this will be well-covered material. The cards are larger than your average card, about 3 1/4-by-5 1/2, with a grooved "record" on the back that plays an interview and highlights when inserted into a special player that I believe you had to purchase separately. Each of the four-packs contain three current players and either ...

Today is Ron Cey's 68th birthday. I must acknowledge my favorite player of all-time's birthday each year and this year I'm doing it with a card I've shown before -- it's one of a dozen signed cards that I own of The Penguin. But it is special because it's Cey's signed 1976 SSPC card. It is special because I now own the 1976 SSPC set (which some call the 1975 SSPC set, but we all know you couldn't buy it until 1976). I recently completed a mammoth trade with Scott Crawford On Cards . More than 1,000 cards exchanged hands in the deal. And most of the cards I received were the 630 cards that make up the '76 SSPC set. I have long wanted this set for a number of reasons. It's a great-looking set that I have admired since I was a teenager, viewing it in the TCMA or Larry Fritsch mail-order catalogs. It features the players from my introduction to baseball, all of the greats from the mid-1970s. And, most important of all, it is a companion set ...