Night Owl Cards

  Is this a new series? I think it might be. I was attempting to hunt down a new angle for the "Joy of a Team Set" series a week or two ago, but I'm starting to feel like I've run out of ideas for that series. I'm not going to end it, I may have just hit a temporary snag, but I thought I'd go in a slightly different direction. I've praised the common, ordinary subset many times on this blog and have devoted a full post to individual ones here and there. I've even written a magazine article focused on them. Subsets seem like a fad of the past, with inserts taking over in the mid-to-late '90s. But the subset still appears periodically. However, I don't count a group of cards as subsets if they are not numbered consecutively in a set. That's the first rule of defining a subset. (Topps, start grouping your league leader cards together again, please). Subsets have been part of main sets since the 1950s, probably longer. During the '50s and ...

I came across this card the other day while reorganizing some Score cards. See if you can tell me what's wrong with it. If you aren't hindered by Mariners-Brewers blindness like me, you probably spotted it right away. But if you are, then it's been 25 years and you're just discovering this now. It's actually a relief to me that there are other people who get the Mariners and Brewers mixed up. I thought it was only me, thanks to the similar color schemes for each team over the years, the fact that they both share Seattle histories, and that Brewers players always end up playing for the Mariners and vice versa. This card is an error card. But it's an uncorrected error card (UER in your handy, archaic price guide), so it's not worth more than a few pennies. I discovered this error just as the weekly #CardChat on Twitter was discussing error cards last week. If you're not familiar with CardChat, it's a fun little Q&A thrown out to collecto...

I cannot possibly begin a post about 1976 Topps cards without opening with the debut of the famed Astros rainbow uniforms on cardboard. This was the first year that these unis appeared on cards. What a glorious mess, eh? All I can think of is "A Christmas Story" when Ralphie comes down in the bunny outfit and his father looks at him and says, "Are you happy in that?" That's what I want to ask the Astros of that era, "were you happy in that?" Hey, I was around in the '70s, but you can't blame that on me. I was just a kid. I've already scolded my mom for some of the get-ups she put me in during the '70s. Anyway, those 'Stros are part of a monster box of cards I received Thursday from Eric of the 1987 Donruss blog . It's a new blog with thoughtful posts on his favorite card set (personally, I prefer '84 or '85 Donruss). Eric's also a Dodger fan (that's right, we're multiplying ). Eric recently bought some '...