Night Owl Cards

  I started Night Owl Cards 13 years ago today and have been churning out copy since. Much has changed about blogging and collecting since I've started and while my blog has undergone some changes, they've been on a much smaller scale. I myself am pretty much the same. Here, let me show you a paragraph about myself that I wrote on the one-year anniversary of this blog: "In many ways, this blog is my personality. I try not to get too deep with it -- this is about baseball, after all -- and by nature I am easygoing and have a sense of humor. But I also have a strong sense of right and wrong, can be direct and abrupt at times, and have always been introspective. It sounds strange, but I am a quiet, thoughtful, humorous guy, who can get loud once in a great while." That's still me, working amid a changed hobby world. Things have gotten bigger for me, particularly in the last year. I've been guesting on a few podcasts (unrelated to the blog, but related to the Tomm...

People who merely watch baseball -- let's call them "no-frills baseball fans" -- theorize that the 2018 baseball season ended on Oct. 28th, the last day of the World Series. But those of us who watch baseball and collect baseball trading cards know better. The end of a given season isn't when the games end. It's when your collection for the year is finished. These days, this could mean that the season will never end, considering how many sets there are and then all that extra stuff, like inserts and parallels and variations and online cards and blah, blah, blah. But if you put a limit on it -- say, determine that the season ends when you've collected all of your team's flagship and update base cards -- then you can have your own season-ender date, which likely will give you a few more weeks of baseball season as I'm still working on the Update Dodgers. This is a much more satisfying finish to a season than what the games offer you. Unles...

I find it a little amusing that I am one of the few people blogging about the Dodgers' 60th anniversary baseball card giveaway, given that I am nowhere near the site where they're giving away the cards. Dodgers Blue Heaven has provided the usual complete rundown on the cards, and I've seen them on gcrl's cards as I see them blog. And, of course, they've appeared on the blog Stadium Fantasium , written by my source for these cards, Andy. He provided me with the first two series in the giveaway , which celebrated Dodgers teams of the 1960s and 1970s, with the 1965 and 1977 Topps designs, respectively. Recently, he sent the next two giveaway packs to me, which focus on the 1980s and 1990s. Let's see those. The 1980s really is the end of a golden age in Dodgers history, which began in the 1940s and ended when the 1990s started. During that period, they reached the postseason 18 times and won the World Series five times. It hasn't been the same si...

Trying to live a life as a Dodgers fan on the east coast is stupid. I admit it. My team's game scores don't make the paper half the time and if I follow the Dodgers online, it requires staying up to 1 or 2 in the morning (this is not a problem for a night owl, but can you imagine if I was one of those unfortunate early risers?). Almost nobody cares about the Dodgers here and there's no one to talk to about them (the biggest Dodger fan I knew in person passed away last year). If you want to express the latest, greatest thing to happen to the Dodgers, you're met with dead silence. Yet, if the exact same thing had happened to the Yankees, the whole town would practically shut down and work would be a nonstop sickening conversation on the glory of pinstripes. You can imagine how lonely it felt when the Dodgers were in the World Series last year. But I picked my favorite team a long time ago and it's too late to change (people who switch allegiance in midstrea...