Night Owl Cards

(I went for a walk yesterday. I had to shoo away bugs. Bugs. In March. In the northernest part of New York. If this weather doesn't put you in mind of baseball, you're not human. Here's to freakish weather -- and the inevitable freezing April. Time for Cardboard Appreciation. This is the 137th in a series): One of the best parts of running a "set blog" is digging up memories of cards that I haven't thought about in decades. When I posted the Roy Smalley card from the 1985 Topps set over on the '85 blog , my mind took me to 1980 and my fondness for this particular Smalley card. One of my favorite parts of seeing the cards of players bestowed with an All-Star logo each spring was pulling the players who were all-star starters for the first time. Players who didn't really seem like all-stars but had broken out for one huge year that even the fans could not ignore. Perhaps a star had dominated the All-Star position year after year, and then sudden...

As a collector, my thoughts on this day go directly to Topps' old Father & Son subset, first issued in a five-card series in 1976 Topps. The Father & Son set continued Topps' habit of displaying its old cards on a current set (Topps did it in 1975 with its MVP subset and in 1974 with its tribute to Hank Aaron). It is a nice contrast, the old card of the father paired with the current photo of the son. The card back is very nice, too (excluding the misspelling of "influence"). The current players "write" about what kind of effect their major league-playing father had on their career. I often wondered how Topps received these "letters" from the players. Did they interview the players or actually ask them to write something down? I have a feeling they weren't interviewed, or at least Topps didn't use the words from the interview verbatim. I'll show why later. Almost 10 years later, Topps tried the Father ...