Night Owl Cards

  It's the summer traveling season. We're visiting or greeting visitors, yet the cards keep coming. It's sometimes difficult to focus. What do I write about -- this or this ?   But I've finally settled on a couple of player collections, a rare off-shoot of my main collecting goals. I think they're impressive in their own way.   I just added the Topps Now card for Clayton Kershaw's 3,000th strikeout. I just had to get the card and didn't pay all that much for it. These cards are almost nothing to look at, I don't like them any more than I did when Topps Now first became a thing. Just think if Topps created an interesting design for these, it might have all my money.   But that's just the lead-in card for this post. One of my player collecting projects is to get all of Kershaw's flagship gold cards. I wrote about finishing the run through 2022 a couple of years ago. And I finally decided to get back on that project. So recently, three more cards ha...

 (Happy President's Day. No, I don't have this day off or the week off. I do have an extra day off thanks to the post office not delivering today. But that'll be Wednesday, not today. Wish me luck as I will have ventured out into 13-degree weather with the wind howling at 30 mph tonight. Time for Cardboard Appreciation! This is the 348th in a series):   I received this 1979 Hostess panel from Max of Starting Nine . Every time I land a Hostess panel the debate begins -- cut or leave intact!   Each item is a special case. I am collecting both panels and individual cards for all the '70s Hostess sets and sometimes the decisions are tough. So let's go through what we know:   1. You can see that the panel is scuffed and creased. This means almost nothing to me when it comes to Hostess cards. They practically came out of the package beat up (or more accurately "stained up"). This was long before every card had to be pristine and imprisoned. But it sometimes affe...

As I continue to assess what I really enjoy collecting, I find myself in a sort of collecting limbo. I'll go back to my traditional collecting desires, my many Dodgers cards and Dodgers binders, and that feels quite comfortable to me still. And then I'll dive into some of my more recent interests -- the '70s NFL cards and the Sabres cards and the music cards -- and those seem wonderful in a much more unfamiliar but exciting way. I'm a little out of my comfort zone when it's not all baseball, all-Dodger baseball all the time. I'm not nearly the expert that I am in the baseball arena. But that's OK. The hobby is anything I want it to be. I can test the limits of my comfort if I want. And that's exactly what I did recently, although it wasn't my choice at the beginning. But first, let's see some cards that I am completely comfortable with because I have been collecting them for the life of this blog and earlier: These, and the ...

(I haven't been feeling the Cardboard Appreciation posts lately, which is why they've been so scarce. I'm trying to get back up to speed because I want to have another vote-off and put another card in the Cardboard Appreciation Hall of Fame before the year is out. So this is my attempt to do that. Time for Cardboard Appreciation. This is the 237th in a series): This is directed at all of you set collectors out there. Consistency. How important is it to you? I'm referring to card condition. And I find consistency is quite important in my set collecting world -- even more important than the actual condition of the card. A card in inferior condition isn't a deal breaker if other cards in the set are in inferior collection. For example, if I wanted to collect a complete set of beat-up 1993 Topps, for whatever reason, then any card from '93T that was beat up would do. And, a mint '93 Topps card probably wouldn't make it into the set binder. That...

I would think that the peak season for repacks is mid-summer through the end of the year. Collectors who are addicted enough to check out what is stacked on store shelves the whole year (eyes looking squarely at me), are probably bored at the year's offerings by this point. Series 2 has come and gone, the thrill of Topps base is dead, Heritage is but a memory and A&G doesn't appeal to everyone. Unless you're a Chrome junkie, then a repack is looking pretty good around late August. None of this explains why I bought a repack late last week, while still residing in the trippy pleasant haze of this month's release of 2015 Topps. My card-collecting appetite is still geared toward the main course for the year. Why am I dealing in leftovers? Well, it's very simple actually. Around here, 2015 Topps is only at the big box stores, which are way out THERE. I have to drive through traffic, and several miles in the case of one Walmart. Meanwhile, there is a lit...

So, writing three blogs is kind of pain in the ass. It requires quite a bit of devotion and sacrifice and I would be lying if I said I didn't think every now and then about returning to just one blog. But if I wrote just one blog, I'd be eliminating a considerable source of material. I get ideas, man from the other two blogs. Maybe they're not the most fantastic ideas -- it's not like receive a Christmas break, you know -- but they amuse me. For example, I posted the above card of Steve Carlton on the 1985 Topps blog a couple of days ago. It's Carlton's 70th birthday on Monday and I mentioned that, too. But I can't look at a card of Steve Carlton for very long without thinking of how he trolled the 1984 Topps set. Carlton, if you remember his greatest days, was one of the most prominent players in the major leagues in 1984. His team, the Phillies, had just appeared in the World Series the previous year. Meanwhile, Carlton enjoyed status as both a s...

I do not drink as much beer as I once did. I would never call myself a beer connoisseur -- talk of making your own beer, the breweries you've discovered, or other esoteric ruminations about hops and barley bore me completely -- but I enjoy a good brew. Today, though, I can mostly confine beer-imbibing to one of two categories. 1) It's summertime and I'm off. 2) I'm exhausted and the world has decided "night owl is the enemy." Today it's in the high 70s, rather humid, and I've got a busy workload tonight. None of this really falls into category 1) or 2), but for some reason -- perhaps the nine zillion beer commercials that I've watched during all of my baseball viewing has finally gotten to me -- I can't stop thinking about a beverage. In short, I need a beer. Here's the problem. There's no beer in the house. And with the budget cutbacks continuing for another week, I can't be buying any without there being ... um ... r...