Night Owl Cards

  It's award season. I think if you watched any football yesterday, you know that, with advertisements for the airing of the upcoming Grammys, for artists you don't know and songs you wish you never heard.   In keeping with the season, Trading Card Database announced their yearly "site awards" and Night Owl Cards came away with " Favorite Blog " for the third straight year. Woo-hoo! Throw in the Blog of the Year honor from Nachos Grande a few weeks ago and it's another sweep! It's a consensus, if you're not reading, you're receding! Thanks for the votes. It's a little weird to be getting accolades after doing this for so long. It's not 2009 anymore, NOC isn't the new, hot, young thing. But I appreciate it, and I appreciate all that TCDB does for acknowledging collectors and collections. I still use only a small part of what's available on the site. I don't use the forums, nor do I comment, nor have I started trading. As I...

  It's been a year since I became a member of Trading Card Database. I'm pretty happy I joined. The site speaks to the compiler and categorizer in me and while there are some minor annoyances with it (I don't care about your copyright variations please stop! ), overall it's helped my collection quite a bit. The TCDB numbers tell the story though, so let's see some of them: Total cards in my collection: 92,110 Total baseball cards in my collection: 89,119 Total Dodgers in my collection: 25,342 Player with most cards in my collection: Clayton Kershaw, 996 (No. 1,000 is already in the house.) Where that ranks among TCDB Kershaw collectors: Fifth. (I used to be 4th and will probably drop more in this category. Kershaw collectors are getting rabid, I just got an offer on there asking me to sell a Kershaw atomic refractor, which I'm not doing). Top 10 players in terms of total cards: Kershaw, Mike Piazza, Hideo Nomo, Shawn Green, Matt Kemp, Eric Karros, Raul Mond...

  I skipped out on a card show today because it was more than an hour away, gas prices are stupid and I couldn't get up in time to make it worthwhile (I work until 1 or 2 a.m. Saturdays while Sunday card shows start at 10 a.m the following day and are packing up by 3). So I'm spending my Sunday just wandering aimlessly when I could have been directing my energy leafing through binders and boxes at a show. There won't be a lot of direction for this post but, don't worry, I'll show you some stuff. First off, some big news on the Trading Card Database collection update front.   I've been adding cards from my collection to TCDB since September and I finally am closing in on listing all of my Dodgers on there. Here is the up-to-the-minute total, and note where it ranks among other TCDB collectors:   As it should be.   That total is sure to go up. It's actually 66 cards more than the amount I showed on Twitter yesterday. I'm sure there are pockets of my collec...

  I've always assumed that someone was a bigger Ron Cey card collector than I was. The Dodgers are a popular team. Cey was a popular player. I know I wasn't the only kid who had his poster hanging from my wall (left side, just over the desk, to the left of my bed). The way he was able to get so much talent out of that body was naturally appealing to a short little guy like me, not that I ever thought that was the reason he was my favorite player. But as I've gushed about my fanhood over the dozen-plus years of this blog, I've become known as the preeminent Ron Cey fan and card collector, at least among those who read card blogs. Heck, even Cey himself acknowledged my long period of dedication in that birthday card he signed. So, you know, I now have a reputation to uphold, even as I think someone out there has got to have more and rarer Cey cards than me. Today, I defended that reputation on Trading Card Database: I moved into the top spot in terms of all TCDB members w...

(I have finally reached the 64th Cardboard Appreciation card since the last time we voted a card into the Cardboard Appreciation Hall of Fame. Way back in 2017! That means after this card, it's time to vote one card from the most recent 64 into the the C.A Hall with the fifth version of the Cardboard Appreciation Hall of Fame Tournament! I'm not sure how to do this since Blogger has removed the polling option. I could look around for another poll to upload. So, it'll take me time to research that. Any suggestions are welcome. Meanwhile, it's time for Cardboard Appreciation. This is the 312th in a series):   You guys have been holding out on me. This is the final base card Dodger that I needed to complete the 1997 Pinnacle Inside team set. It wasn't Piazza or Nomo, as it traditionally is for this time period. It was Park and his wacky head band strolling through the dugout.   I didn't discover the card was the lone one missing until I was recently filing my late ...

   It's satisfying as a Dodgers fan to see Braves fans warm to Joc Pederson in that "we already knew that" way that sports fans think. It's not satisfying to discover that your Joc Pederson card has been filed wrong for at least a couple of years. Welcome to my disorganized collection. I like to think that my collection is very organized. My Dodgers binders, specifically, are sorted by year from the very earliest to the very latest. They are then sorted by set and then alphabetically. It's easy enough for most major releases. But when you throw in oddballs and inserts and such, it gets much more difficult, and I've worked very hard to figure out the "year of issue" of each card. Or so I thought. One of the advantages -- or maybe I'm thinking it's a disadvantage at this particular point -- of filing your collection on Trading Card Database is you discover how wrong you were. And how many times -- many, many, many times -- you were wrong. My co...

  Hey, guys! I've joined Trading Card Database!   I know, you never thought you'd see the day. I was the same way.   I wasn't eager to add another card thing in my life, especially not one that involved more filing of my collection as well as interacting with even more people on the interwebs.   The fact that certain collectors were pushing it like Amway members didn't help. Nor did the memory of other online card database systems disappearing forever.   But I decided to join anyway. Ever since my desktop computer died a couple of months ago, and my ancient spreadsheet that inventoried my collection along with it, I haven't had a good way to keep tabs on my entire collection.   I do keep track of certain key totals on the blog. I know the total number of cards I have and I know which players are represented the most in my collection. I'm good with knowing the amount of cards I have for maybe the top 200 or so guys.   But if you were to ask me "how many...