Night Owl Cards

I know what you guys are doing to me. I finally get my massive want list updated. It takes me two months and I'm discovering sets and parallels that I never knew existed on a weekly basis. But I finally hit 2010 the other day, and it's finished, and I'm taking a break before I go BACK through it to include 2011 and everything I missed between 1950-80. So what happens? I get a package from Spiegel that contains cards from the 1977 Topps set. He knows I'm collecting it, so it's totally a generous act on his part. But what he doesn't know is that while I was updating the want list, I went back and forth and back and forth about whether I wanted to put up a want list for '77 Topps. I decided against it. Because I've really got to get '71 finished and then seriously start hitting '72s with an animal frenzy. A wide load of '77s would only derail the mission. But I really agonized over it. I do love the '77s for many reasons and gett...

Have you ever thought about what makes a fitting final card for a player? I have. To me, this is an ideal farewell card for the late, great Paul Lindblad. Lindblad was pitching for the Rangers in 1978 when he was purchased by the Yankees on Aug. 1. He appeared in seven games for New York and was purchased again after the season by the Mariners. He wouldn't appear in the majors after '78, and this 1979 Topps is the final card of his career. The card looks the way it does, probably, because Topps didn't have much time to find Lindblad in a Yankees uniform, given that he arrived in New York in August. Normally, this would mean that Topps would go the airbrush route. But Topps is located in New York, so it probably found a way to track down a photo of Lindblad in pinstripes. It wasn't made the normal way -- during daytime at spring training -- that baseball card photos were made in the '70s. Instead, Lindblad appears to have been photographed in Yankee Stadium ju...

(Cars, household appliances, property are subject to depreciation. What a sad word: depreciation. Let's talk "appreciation," and something that never depreciates -- at least in the mind of collectors -- BASEBALL CARDS! These are the cards I appreciate: my all-time favorites. Here is another edition of Cardboard Appreciation. This is the third in a series): Long before I knew the sad story of Paul Lindblad, that he suffered through a 12-year battle with Alzheimer's Disease and was confined to a nursing home for almost a decade before his eventual death a couple of years ago, I felt sorry for him for a far more trivial reason. Look at this card. Lindblad is at maximum effort, pouring his heart and soul into this pitch, all in front of seemingly no one. Aren't those folded-up bleacher seats in the background? (I'm asking, I don't know for sure). It seems that if Lindblad is going to make like Mitch Williams and practically trip himself up into an ass-over-ba...