Night Owl Cards

  I fall into this trap of unspoken moping about the length of time that it takes me to complete sets. Sometimes I whine publicly: Ebay shoppers are snapping up all my cards. The prices online are increasingly ridiculous. Waah! Waah!   But objectively, when emotion is taken out of the conversation, we've got it pretty good in a lot of ways. Do you ever think about how it used to be? Before the internet? If you wanted to collect a set 30 years ago, you relied on card shows, mail-order catalogs and magazines or trades with friends, relatives or acquaintances. You also bought lots and lots and lots of packs in hopes that 1 of the 12 cards inside would be one you needed. Twenty years ago, I was not online. I had just gotten back into the hobby a little. I discovered there was a person downstairs in my work office that collected 1970s cards like I did. And I knew another person in my office who had cards, but he was more interested in selling what he had. That was it. But I wasn't ...

I didn't watch the Hall of Fame induction ceremonies yesterday, probably for the first time in 10 years. Part of the reason was the TV in the living room suddenly decided to stop cooperating (it's settled down since). But mostly it was because I wasn't feeling it. I already saw the Mike Piazza documentary, I'd had my fill. And while half my blogging compadres grew up with Griffey, I don't have that connection. We've entered the period where we're inducting 1990s players and my baseball-viewing was at an all-time low during that decade. I expect this disconnect to continue until the Hall starts inducting people from the Kershaw era. Everyone made a big deal about Griffey putting his cap on backward at the end of his speech. That was what he was known for. Griffey had style. But I grew up in an era when almost everyone had style. During baseball in the 1970s, you could put on style or take it off -- like Griffey's hat -- with the wild uniforms and...

Last week I pulled from the mailbox my third or fourth package in the last couple of months from Cards on Cards  (sorry about the spill, dude). The pace he's on is crazy. Here I am trying to keep from slipping more than a month behind, and madding's firing off cards and -- just as amazingly -- finding cards that I NEED at about the same rate that I go grocery shopping. I'm baffled at how he does it, but happy that he does. The cards this time, as they always are, were directly from my want list. I think madding's been finding '90s goodies at some card shows lately, so he's been passing those never-before-seen items on to me. So, of course, there were ... Piazzas ... and Nomos ... ... and other assorted '90s items (not all shown here). But what really caught my eye ... or, shall I say, caught my nose , were some 1979 Topps needs. Here's the very first card in the set. And here's the rookie card of a player we ...

Even though the Dodgers won the World Series in 1981, I'm not going to pretend that '81 was a great year, because it wasn't. For those of you who weren't around then, there was the baseball strike, the horrific Hyatt Regency walkway collapse, and a plague of assassination attempts. Music was an atrocious wasteland. For every Tattoo You or video on fledgling MTV, there was Endless Love (and it was endless) , Kenny Rogers croaking "Lady," and I Love a Rainy Night, I Love a Rainy Night, I Love a Rainy Night, I Love a Rainy Night, I Love a Rainy Night (that was the whole damn song). As a teenager glued to my radio, it seemed that just as one horrible song had run its course, another horrid song took its place. Celebrate Good Times, Come On? Not if Bette Davis Eyes kept staring me down from my stereo speakers every half hour. The year was filled with normal teenage angst for me, and baseball cards were there to ease my pain, much as they are today. Those c...

In honor of the Super Bowl, I thought I'd address the major league team that dresses the most like one of the two teams playing in what Martha Stewart-types call "The Big Game." The color green is not terribly common in professional sports, but it is particularly uncommon in major league baseball. Of the four major professional sports, MLB seems the most frightened of the color. A brief rundown: NFL: Teams that wear green are the Packers, Jets, Eagles and Seahawks. The Eagles have converted to something called "midnight green," which means "stare really hard and you might seen green in there." I prefer their old uniforms. NHL: Green-wearers are the Stars, Wild and Canucks. Of course, the dearly departed Whalers wore green, and I rather liked the Christmas red-and-green uniforms the Devils used to wear. It was the only thing good about that team. NBA: Teams featuring green are the Celtics, Bucs and Jazz. The Timberwolves once wore green as di...

The Baseball Hall of Fame's official magazine, "Memories and Dreams," is delivered to my newspaper office about six times a year. Most of the time it doesn't have anything to do with my job, but I'm interested in baseball, so I take it home and read it. There's not a lot to it: a few stories about Hall of Famers and exhibits. Some stuff I knew, some stuff I didn't. But the magazine that arrived the other day drew my attention. It was all about baseball cards. The cover features the T206 Honus Wagner. And there are articles about the Wagner card, Jefferson Burdick (known as the father of card collecting), Sy Berger and baseball card exhibits at the Hall of Fame. There's also a story about the explosion of sports memorabilia and card shops in Cooperstown. People who have attended the induction ceremonies recently can't help but notice them. But when I was a kid, there weren't very many memorabilia shops when we visited. Later, I return...

(Happy Cinco de Mayo! Those of you who are celebrating, have a cerveza for me. You also might want to have a hoagie and some oysters, because it's also National Hoagie Day and Oyster Day! Paaaaarrrrty! It's also time for Cardboard Appreciation. This is the 29th in a series): I'll be the first to admit that we are spoiled as card collectors today. Not only do we have a wide variety of choices from a couple of different card companies but we have all kinds of innovations -- chrome, refractors, relics, throwback cards, die-cuts, etc., etc. -- that never existed when I was a kid. Perhaps where we're spoiled most of all is in the area of photography. We expect, almost demand, good photography in our sets, from base card all the way up. If you mail it in photo-wise, as Topps seemed to do in 2008, you're going to get ripped. And I'll be one of the first in line. But good photos weren't always the norm. And action photos were bizarre, if not lousy up until the earl...