Night Owl Cards

  I can't say there was ever a time when I liked every card that came out of a pack or into my collection.   Even in my youngest days of opening packs, between 1974-76, there were cards I didn't like. That was based entirely on the goofy whims of little kids -- what the player looked like, whether they wore a hat, whether they had a "weird" (to us) name.   As I grew older, my dislikes were based on other ideas: what team they played for, whether their team had wronged my team and sometimes the behavior of the player on the field, which was mostly confined to Reggie Jackson and Pete Rose.   Now my card dislikes can come from a host of reasons: certain teams and behaviors, sure, but also what card brand it is, what ridiculous parallel it is, and -- here's something we never considered as kids -- what those players say and how they act off the field. It's safe to say that we know too much and it's affecting the way I feel about the cards that arrive at my hom...

  For the second straight year, and the fourth time in five years, the Dodgers have reached the League Championship Series.   Many fans -- I have been made very aware -- don't like this. But that comes with the territory when as a fan you're part of an exclusive club for more than one or two years in a row. The Dodgers are the villain.   I know that relatively few on social media will be rooting for the Dodgers. (A lot are rooting for a World Series between the Mariners-Brewers, who are practically the same team). I have tried to add known Dodgers fans to my following list in hopes of balancing out the anti-Dodger content, but the best-case scenario is to avoid social media as much as possible. We'll see how that goes. Social media is great for getting immediate info on plays during the course of a game, nothing else compares.   A lot of the people who comment on this blog aren't part of social media sites, so I'll move on to the card part of the post.   The two...

  It was kind of busy this weekend. I went down for a card show today and it takes quite a bit of driving -- this is the bigger one, instead of the one right in town.   I'll have a full report on that in the next day or two, but I wanted to make a quick observation about some very modern cards for a moment.   The above three cards sit consecutively in the 2025 Topps portion of my Dodgers binder. They are all parallels. But they are not the same parallel.   Perhaps you can tell from the image. I realized after taking pictures that the differences are a little more obvious in the photos than if you're just looking at them with the naked eye. But let's go through the "differences" shall we?    River Ryan is the "Holo Foil" parallel.      Teoscar Hernandez is the "Confetti" parallel.       Shohei Ohtani is the "Sandglitter" parallel.   None of these parallels are numbered, which would have helped narrow things down. As you can...

  I enjoyed seeing the Dodgers go 2-for-2 over in Japan the last couple of days. Not that I was able to see it live. Anything happening between 5-8 in the morning is guaranteed to be slept through by this night owl. I think I've seen maybe 20 sunrises in my entire life, and a few of those were because I stayed up all night.   So, I caught a partial rewatch each day, where I had time. Beyond admiring Roki Sasaki, Tommy Edman, Will Smith, etc., I was impressed with the relative ease the whole experience was for the Dodgers and Cubs. This is international travel with all kinds of preparations and issues.   Heck, I can't even get a simple envelope of cards across an international border that's 30 miles from me.   A couple of months ago I went to send a package to Sportscards From the Dollar Store as I have done many times before. It's shipping to Canada, which is a little more, but I don't mind. But this time, when I gave my package to the post office employee she told...