Night Owl Cards

  Yesterday I completed the 1969 Topps set. While home for dinner, I opened a couple of card orders and the last one contained card No. 500, Mickey Mantle.   It's the yellow-name variety, it's the last Mantle card issued during his career, and all that stuff. Most importantly for me, it's the final card.   I thought it would take me longer to get this card and finish the set. Once I had acquired the Nolan Ryan in September (and the Phil Regan, don't forget him!), I started looking at Mantle prices. I didn't like what I saw. But I didn't do a thorough search, so I figured there was something a bit more reasonable out there for when the time came.    Well, the time came a couple of weeks ago. Out of the blue, I received a reimbursement check from my health insurance that I wasn't expecting, and I immediately knew where some of that was going to go. I started searching again and it became apparent that I was going to have to spend $200 to get anything that was...

  I'm not sure where I got this post idea, it's possible it came from Nick's blog , but the spark from wherever made me wonder about switch-hitters and cards. How easy was it to find separate cards of a switch-hitter hitting from both sides of the plate, or at least posing as both a left-handed batter and right-handed batter? My guess was it's probably pretty easy. And in researching, I found that it's very easy. Just to have a frame of reference, I found this article from three years ago, presenting a lineup of the best switch-hitters in MLB history. Then I went to work going through my collection. Even in this era of being able to find almost any card image on TCDB, etc., I still would rather pull cards from my collection when I can. Yeah, it takes longer and, oh, the putting back , but I'm a slave to tradition.   Here is a look at the team (remember, I didn't pick this team) and a card of each player as a lefty and righty swinger:     Left field: Tim Ra...

I don't know whether it's because I watched the Yankees lose last night or that I recently landed a couple of Yankees cards that finished off some sets, but I'm in a cheerful New York state of mind with this post. This very unnatural-looking card of The Mick, fresh off of my Nebulous 9 list, finally, at long last, completed the Mantle insert set from 2006 Topps. As regular readers may know, I have been attempting to complete as many things as I can from the 2006 Topps set as that's what vaulted me back into the modern part of the hobby. I don't normally try to finish insert sets randomly, but that's what I've been trying to do with '06. It's more of a half-hearted attempted 15 years later, but I can say I wrapped up one in 2021! Mantle is all over 2006 with a card for every home run he hit running rampant at this time. But the Mantle insert set is a tidy 10 cards (OK, OK, 10-card insert sets are actually infuriating). Each card featured Mantle on one...

  There is really no explanation for me suddenly being able to make such swift progress on the 1956 Topps set other than that "the stars aligned." For decades, the total number of '56 Topps cards in my collection sat at around 120, each one obtained on a single, glorious early 1980s evening, a gift from my dad's co-worker, someone I had never seen and I still don't know his name. Those were the cards that ignited the spark, that this was indeed one of the greatest sets ever made and would be amazing to complete ... you know, in another dimension, where objectives that were obviously impossible became possible. Sure, I now owned one-third of the set. But outside of the Newcombe, Erskine and Slaughter cards, I had no big stars. None of the cards were Yankees, the team of choice of whoever gave us the cards. Then the rest of the 1980s happened and cards became "an investment." The prices for those '56 cards, especially the stars, shot up. As the years m...

I grew up during the Topps monopoly. I was conditioned to wait for one set -- and one set only -- each year. I didn't mind. I didn't know any better, and I liked Topps' sets a lot. I was obsessed with them. And when other companies came along to challenge Topps, I considered them infiltrators. Topps was the one company truly qualified to produce baseball cards. But it's clear, even back then as a young adolescent, that subconsciously I wanted something more. This card of Mickey Mantle is the other item I received from Scott Crawford On Cards that I mentioned in the last post. Scott is the one who gifted me with the complete 1976 SSPC set that I will treasure forever (and I'm still attempting to catalog). A little while ago, he mentioned that there were some promo cards for this set, which I never knew. He said he had a Mantle that he could send me (the other promo cards are Hank Aaron, Catfish Hunter, Dave Kingman, Willie Mays and Tom Seaver). The pr...

Seven years ago today, Night Owl Cards began. Inspired by The Baseball Card Blog and a few others, I tossed out my first effort in the middle of the night on Sept. 13, 2008. It's a little known fact that the seven-year mark in card blogs is termed the "Mantle-versary," after the jersey number worn by the obsession of the Topps trading card company, Mickey Mantle. I've known about Mickey Mantle from the time I first started buying cards as a 9-year-old. He showed up in the very first packs I ever bought, way back in 1975. This ... And this were two of the first cards I ever pulled out of packs that I purchased. And the cartoon on the back of Gorman Thomas' 1975 Topps card clued me in to Mantle's uniform number. Even though Mantle retired four years after I was born and played for a team I learned to dislike at an early age, I was forced to know the history of Mantle. As a card collector it was a requirement, and soon I kn...