Night Owl Cards

(Greetings. I have no special opening this time, I just got up from a nap. A thing old people do. Time for Cardboard Appreciation. This is the 329th in a series): My latest sportlots order is working its way to my house. It's down to the final few cards. I don't plan to show much of it on the blog, it's mostly upgrades, a few Dodgers needs and a set filler here and there. If I get desperate maybe I'll show something, but that's what this post is for! One of the cards I got was this 1986 Topps Bob Rodgers. I completed the 1986 set long ago, one of the first that I finished with help from bloggers. But it turns out I never actually finished it. It's been laughing at me -- in a binder -- for 14 years. The 1986 set is the first set in my collecting time that I didn't have memorized ... well, same goes for 1984 and 1985 Topps, but I bought those in their entirety, there was no room for slip-ups. But in '86, I ignored everything cards. And so, I picked up the...

  I mentioned when I completed the 1988 Donruss set that it marked the first time I had completed four major sets from a given year.   I don't see that happening for me ever again. After the '80s, it's difficult for me to find multiple sets I was interested in enough to try to complete them. For example, I've completed 1993 Upper Deck, I wouldn't bother throwing money at any other '93 set outside of a token Topps complete-set buy. (I'd take a gift of a complete '93 Stadium Club or Pinnacle set but I'm not buying them).   So '88 is a milestone, a one-of-a-kind collecting feat. I like that it's '88. That's the year the Dodgers won the World Series; it's the year I graduated from college; it's the first full year of my wife and I going out. It's basically the last great year before adulthood stomped everything to hell.   To mark the feat, I thought I'd take 10 notable players from this time and compare their cards from th...

  I decided to go a little deeper into my calculating of which players have the most cards in my collection. I wanted to further illustrate how dominant the late '90s/early '00s are when you're totaling up something like this. I also wanted to see who the top five non-Dodgers are in my collection, going beyond Nolan Ryan and George Brett. When you look deeper into numbers, that's when you catch mistakes. It turns out George Brett doesn't have the second-highest number of cards in my collection among players who haven't played for the Dodgers.   I somehow overlooked Reggie Jackson, who, of course, should have a lot of cards in my collection. I have 106 Reggie Jacksons, which is more than the 98 George Bretts.   The other mistake was in mentioning that Ron Cey was 37th on the list. He's actually 38th. I missed Roy Campanella. He appears in 143 cards in my collection, three more than Cey. Much like Jackie Robinson, precious few of the Campanellas in my collecti...

I was going through some posts on my blog from May of 2010 the other day when the total number of posts written that month caught my eye. I wrote 44 posts that month. This is not a surprise to me. I know I used to post to Night Owl Cards twice a day as often as I could and averaged 40 posts a month. But when my old habits hit me out of the blue like that, I am stunned. What kind of cyborg was I? This May, I will have written 16 posts. This is post 16. That is one more than my record low for posts in a month, which happened twice last year. Some may think I have gotten too "big" for this blog. Life is far busier due to my family health issues. Also there's the matter of writing for Beckett magazine. "Perhaps Mr. Big Shot Night Owl doesn't have the need for this particular writing exercise anymore? Perhaps he can't be bothered with those blog basics: trading, updating want lists, boasting about card acquisitions, etc?" Well, maybe. But I'm g...

I have lots of priority completion tasks when it comes to this hobby, sets that are right at the top of favorites I want to finish. But I don't do a heck of a lot about them sometimes. I need you people to help me. So it is with one of my most favorite retro sets, the 2001 Upper Deck Decade 1970s set. (I've often wondered about the odd name for the set. Did Upper Deck have plans for a "Decade 1960s set," a "Decade 1980s set"? It seems like that might have been the intent). The Mike Schmidt night card here is part of a great selection of cards from the set from The Chronicles of Fuji . Thanks to supertrader Fuji, I'm back on track to completing the set. After receiving 32 cards toward the set, I need just 16 more base cards, and 13 insert cards. As I've mentioned several times, I like the set not only because it features star players from when I was a kid, but also because it blatantly borrows its look from my all-time favorite set, 1975 To...

I know what you're saying: "What? A full set of 1987 Topps and 868 1992 Upper Deck Eric Karros cards isn't the good stuff?" And while the above two things make for excellent blog posting, it is not what excited me about the second box that Rob sent me. It was all of the other things in the box. Among those things were a game program from an August 2015 Dodgers game, a Dodger pennant and Cooperstown pennant, another stack of penny sleeves and more library books. Here are some books that will keep me reading for the next 10 years (that's how often I pick up a book these days): The Dodgers media guide from their last championship season. I love media guides. I'm partly convinced that I became a sports journalist just because you get free media guides. Of course, now teams don't make media guides, or they make an online media guide, which isn't really a media guide at all but go ahead and pretend its real, and all of the perks of being a spor...