Night Owl Cards

   Here is the other 1975 Topps-focused post I wanted to get to before the 50th anniversary year is over.   I've reached sort of a milestone in the 1975 Topps buyback chase. It's been exactly 10 years since I first decided to collect these and see how far I could get. I admit I've gotten farther than I thought I would, particularly when I was first starting the mission. But my approach has always been to keep pressing on. As long as I kept finding new ones -- and I can still afford them -- I'd continue.   I just went over 82 percent of the set in buyback form with the addition of three cards. One is the Bob Forsch here.       These are the other two. I now have 542 of the 660 cards in the set in buyback form.   These three cards would be considered "commons" by most collectors, but they mean much more than that. All three have puzzled me for years. I couldn't figure out why they were so elusive. None are particularly notable. I'd reason that I cou...

I am a simple guy when it comes to numbers. I do like them. But too many make my brain hurt. It's been that way since I sat in math class. I did well. I even did well when the algebra and calculus books came out. But I couldn't wait for it to go away forever. No, the best thing for me when it comes to numbers is to make it simple and make it amuse me. For me, there's no better example than 1981 Fleer. If you collected Fleer that crazy summer of '81 when there were THREE -- that's right, THREE -- sets to chase (it's sad that people younger than age 35 have no idea how freaky that was), you probably remember one of the main components of the card backs. Fleer featured the card number in the left-hand corner and the player's career average or career earned-run average in the right-hand corner. It was kind of nifty, but also confusing. I was forever transposing the average with the card number and I'd think Mitchell Page's card number w...