Night Owl Cards

Right now the baseball buzz on social media is the World Baseball Classic. While I'm happy to see people talking about more baseball, I can't get into the WBC more than periodic glances. A few reasons just to make sense of how I feel:   1. We just had two weeks of an international sports event. I'm tapped out. 2. March has enough chaos and energy -- March Madness, right? I don't need more. 3. The WBC seems to run on star power, which really isn't my focus in baseball (Yes, I know the Dodgers have a ton of stars, I do feel conflicted about that).   For baseball all I need is the Dodgers and the other MLB teams that play the Dodgers. I have a difficult time getting invested in any other kind of baseball, whether that's Olympic, collegiate, Banana Ball or any of the many, many non-MLB leagues through history. I've found where my heart will reside forever -- as corporate as MLB may be now.   My collection reflects that -- in the pursuit of MLB-themed sets and, o...

  Back when I first returned to modern cards, I discovered a brand called Heritage in 2008. It appealed to me instantly and though I've had a love-hate relationship with the brand and its forced short-prints, it's always been one of my favorites.   I didn't need any of the parallels -- the regular set was enough -- but back then there weren't many. There were the chrome parallels and then you could find black-bordered chrome cards as Target exclusives, which were all the rage at the time. I did like those.   Then there were other parallels connected to store-issues -- red borders for Target and blue for Walmart -- that were fun and, again, manageable. Purple chrome hot box parallels, too.   Today, though, I can't even keep track of them all. 2025 Heritage has seen an explosion of parallel cards. While 2024 Heritage had a lot, too, I could ignore them because I love the '75 design so much I don't need a stinkin' parallel. But '25 has even more and I a...

(*music fans, go to the end) The National is this coming next week and I know several collectors who are attending. Many of them attend every year or close to it.   I'll be in my usual spot, spending much less money and happy not to deal with crowds. Meanwhile, I have some cards here from someone who is planning to go to the big show in Chicago, or maybe is already on the way to digging in discount boxes.   Some of you have also recently received cards from Stuart at S.R. '75 Cards . So this is my turn to decipher what he sent, because a lot of it was from that black hole collecting period of the early 2000s. As an example, I had neatly separated the envelope into cards I needed and cards I didn't. Per usual, I turned the duplicate cards over to signal to my future self that I had them.   One card on its reverse side at the top of the stack caught my eye.     Card-creating gentlemen, this is why you always serial-number your cards in gold foil. I was looking at ...

  It's almost nothing to own cards of retired players, so-called "legends cards," these days. Thanks to the MLB-Topps agreement, legends are included in virtually every current set. They're ubiquitous in inserts and in sets like Archives and Allen & Ginter. You can find cards of them for a quarter, which just doesn't seem right.   Maybe that's because I knew a different time. As a youngster collecting cards, my focus was solely on the players of the day. This was the 1970s and 1980s, and virtually all sets available, year after year, offered nothing but current players.   Cards of legends were mostly confined to past releases. Want a card of Willie Mays? Find someone dumb enough to trade you a card from the 1960s, because that's the only way you were going to get him.   Eventually I became aware of card issues from TCMA and Galasso and Laughlin. These were all oddball sets, not available at your store down the road, but they contained retired players. ...

  I knew this would happen this year. I even sent out a warning early in the year, saying that topics would be very 1975 Topps-centric in 2024. To review, Heritage is covering the 1975 Topps set and there are original '75 buybacks in the set that I am pursuing along with the main set. Also I'm running a countdown review of the original set and I just put up the latest edition the other day. That's a lot of two-tone cards, many of which are from almost 50 years ago , and there's not really an end in sight, and I feel a little bit sheepish about that as I know some collectors don't care about this set (WHY?), so I should probably mix things up a little more.   But also this is MY BLOG so never mind what I just said. I've got MOAR '75 TOPPSY TO SHOW!!!   I recently received an envelope from Greg of The Collective Mind . Both Greg and collecting buddy Stuart opened a case of 2024 Heritage (I'm so jealous) and I'm looking forward to those posts. (Stuart h...