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...

We're three weeks away from the end of the year and probably the biggest card news of all of 2016 has at long last ... finally ... arrived here at the night owl nest. Perhaps you've heard: I don't follow the trends. This card is my first Topps Now card. The first on-demand card set made its debut on April 3 and collectors everywhere plunked down $9.99 for a single card ... repeatedly. Others searched out deals to acquire the outrageously priced items much more cheaply. Me? I quietly pined for some of the Dodgers early on, then decided they were best ignored. At one point I spied a Topps Now card or two for $5, or some other price I could live with, and placed it in one of my online carts. There, it was either snatched out from under me or I found something else much more enjoyable and cheaper. And, so, the second week into December, I still didn't know what a Topps Now card felt like or truly looked like. Now, however, I have one. And my thoughts are ... ...

This post will be devoid of cards that I own. You'll know why in a second. If you've been following the 2016 Allen & Ginter hubbub -- today is the set's release date -- you probably know that there is some sneakiness involving card No. 120. The official Topps A&G checklist lists two Dodgers with that same number: But since people have started opening the product, they've discovered that the Kenta Maeda card is the actual base card set. Julio Urias -- get ready to groan Dodger fans -- is a super short-print. There is some speculation about whether there are different versions of that short-print, but so far I've only seen the one that box-breaker Brent Williams has shown: There is actually a nameplate under Urias' image but it's very faint. It's printed in white so it's difficult to see. As I am writing this, the Urias card is now the most difficult card in the entire A&G set to pull. As a Dodger fan, that is simply ...