Night Owl Cards

  I hit the road for the fourth time in a week yesterday, wrapping up my vacation with a card show. Interestingly, I did the exact same thing at this time last year, and just like last year, Angus, of Dawg Day Cards , joined me. It's the perfect way to finish off a vacation, because usually I'm in a downer mood that final day and a show is the perfect pick-me-up. There's nothing like a card show. There's nothing like it to get your mind off of despair and drudgery and there's nothing like it for, well, a lot of things.  Let's explore.   There's nothing like a card show to get you out of bed early   The show at the state fairgrounds has been starting and ending earlier than in the past. They also have that VIP thing now in which you can show up even earlier for whatever exclusives I don't care about enough to lose sleep for.   But since this show came during my vacation, there was no late-night shift the previous night. We could get started a whole hour e...

    I don't have a lot of mini collections. I can't focus on that many hobby things these days anyway, but I've never been the mini-collection type. If I did venture outside of my set/team/player-sphere, one of the collections I would set up is cards of players who later became broadcasters when I was starting to learn baseball. They were my first baseball teachers. Yeah, sure there were youth league coaches and my dad and all that, but I wanted to know about Major Leaguers, not that "keep your eye on the ball" stuff. Fortunately there were guys on TV who told me all about major leaguers. Sure, there were people like Vin Scully and Keith Jackson and Lindsey Nelson and Frank Messer. But the ones who knew all the inside stuff were usually called "the color commentators" and they were usually former ballplayers. Ex-ballplayers like Joe Garagiola, Tony Kubek, Ralph Kiner and Don Drysdale were invaluable to me learning about professional ballplayers and what ...

I just made print copies of the two 1973 Topps cards that are in my Dodgers binders so I can slip them into the empty spaces in my 1973 Topps set pages to signify that the '73 set is complete. They'll be place-holders until I get a second copy of the Walter Alston card and the Cey-Hilton-Schmidt rookie third basemen card. As you can see, I need a new ink cartridge, but this isn't the season for such "extras." So I'll have to make these copies again. I wanted to get them done now though because it's time for the "1973 Topps Set Is Done" post. I'm not pushing it back any longer. Completing the 1973 Topps set is cool for all the usual reasons, including that I have all the Topps sets from 1971-91 finished now, but for one other big reason, too. And that is to right a wrong. I didn't used to care about this set. Really. There's a post about it way early in my blog history. I ranked 1973 Topps at the bottom of all th...