Night Owl Cards

  Needed a fun, short post for a Friday and the mail carrier delivered. I'll try to remember this when the post office eats my ESE (ebay standard envelope) order.   A couple of weeks ago I received an alert on one of my ebay searches for the Ron Cey MSA discs. Someone had put up for sale one of the final four I needed. It had been a good while since I had seen one I didn't have.   Unfortunately:   That next word after "Very" is "Scarce". Yeah, OK, buddy. There's no way I'm paying that for an unlicensed disc that looks like a bunch of others already in my collection. Just to confirm that this was a rip-off, I found someone else selling like 15 MSA discs of the same Red Barn variation for $15. There was no Ron Cey in the lot, unfortunately, but I thought about getting it anyway. Sadly, someone scooped it up while I was thinking. (The Red Barn back has two varieties, one with an address on the back and one without. But this seller doesn't mention wh...

  It's the summer traveling season. We're visiting or greeting visitors, yet the cards keep coming. It's sometimes difficult to focus. What do I write about -- this or this ?   But I've finally settled on a couple of player collections, a rare off-shoot of my main collecting goals. I think they're impressive in their own way.   I just added the Topps Now card for Clayton Kershaw's 3,000th strikeout. I just had to get the card and didn't pay all that much for it. These cards are almost nothing to look at, I don't like them any more than I did when Topps Now first became a thing. Just think if Topps created an interesting design for these, it might have all my money.   But that's just the lead-in card for this post. One of my player collecting projects is to get all of Kershaw's flagship gold cards. I wrote about finishing the run through 2022 a couple of years ago. And I finally decided to get back on that project. So recently, three more cards ha...

    This is post No. 5500 on the blog. Not that the number means all that much, unless you tell someone outside the hobby that you've written 5,500 blog posts about accumulating cards. That will probably draw some sort of reaction.   To them -- most of them anyway -- it's all just mindless accumulation. It's all stuff for the throw-out man eventually. But to me, and the people who read this -- this blog isn't FOR YOU, people who think cards are dumb -- every card added has meaning. It fits into a specific category that pays tribute to whatever thing -- baseball, player, year, hobby -- that means something to that collector.   There's probably no more appropriate time than to go through some recent pickups -- wildly unconnected -- that have been occupying space on my card desk for too long. Yeah it's another show-off post. I'm 5500 posts in now, I can't change.   This will illustrate exactly how many kinds of cards I think are important and also that I ...