Night Owl Cards

Every day is a good day for baseball cards, but there are some that are better than others. This is one of them. I don't know if it's the sudden arrival of summer here in the Northeast or just that July has always been the most spectacular month out of the year, but I can't help but notice how many players with cool baseball cards were born this very day. Let's take Moises Alou, for instance. This 1992 Stadium Club card of his has always been a favorite, one of my go-to cards from the entire set. Alou is a '90s player so you can always find something notable on a card for him, but this one is clearly the best: Montreal Expos uniform. Red Montreal Expos uniform. Montreal Expos helmet. The bluest sky ever. The chain link fence. Get me to a baseball game, stat! How about another '90s guy? Greg Vaughn was also born today. Again, we're' fishing in the 1992 pond, a terrible year in many ways, but for baseball cards the hobby was starting to dig o...

It's no secret that Topps, and other card companies, employ all kinds of trickery to get collectors to buy their products. "Tricks of the trade" has a whole new meaning when every product features 12 different variation sets and the company doesn't announce any of them. If you're of a particular mind-set, you might think you're being taken for a fool. But fools, in reality, is probably what we are as collectors. We collect little picture cards of athletes, who are better than us only in a talent that quickly becomes irrelevant for 99 percent of the population by the time they're out of school. Is this what we really value in life? OK, but before I get too deep, I'll steer it back to one of the oldest tricks in Topps' trade. It's their annual April Fool's Day trick, and it continues throughout the year. I'm referring to the airbrushing and photoshopping that goes on to create alternate realities on those little pieces of cardboa...

I am at the stage in collecting -- or more accurately I'm at that stage in life -- where a retail pack of 2013 whatever can't possibly compete with a simple repack of old cards. They're both the same price, as you know. A single rack pack of Topps Update and one of those Fairfield rack pack "guess what's inside" repacks run about $4.99 with the repack yielding a lot more cards. I guess you're paying for "new" with the other pack. But when I bought one of each last week I received so much more "card collectibility" out of the repack. Not a surprise. Not something I haven't said before. Not something others haven't said before. It was just so apparent , that's all. The most notable feature of the Update pack was that it was a Mariners' hot pack. Besides the emerald Aaron Harang card, there were these Seattlites: What to do with these cards? I suppose I'll send them off to Larry at Emerald City Diamon...

OK, I'll make this quick. We've all seen A&G blaster breaks, right? We're pretty sick of them, right? But I have a point. I do not live in a big city. I do not live near a big city. The closest hobby store to me is a three-hour round trip. Visits to eBay fill the gaps, but my allotted computer fun time is very limited. So for me, retail blasters are the way to go. They're relatively easy to find, you get the cards immediately, and I've changed my mind from a previous post : unless you're 10 cards or less away from completing a set, a blaster is always satisfying. So, what follows is what I got today. I'm only listing the cards I needed, because scanning, or even listing, duplicates, bores me like a walk through the Yarn Barn. For the sake of brevity, I will keep my comment about each card to one sentence. If I write more than one sentence, as my punishment, I will write something nice about the Cubs (gulp!). Here we go: No. 199, Daric Barton. I swear yo...