Night Owl Cards

  These are bizarre words for me to write but this year marks 50 years since I first held baseball cards in my hand. Those cards were 1974 Topps baseball cards. Had Heritage not been so scared to begin with Topps' first real baseball set when it kicked off the brand in 2001, we'd be celebrating my 50 years with the '74 design in Heritage. Full circle! But Heritage has been out of kilter ever since and I need to take a time-out every time I try to figure out which set Heritage will be replicating in the 2030s when it should take milliseconds. Heritage did the '74 thing last year and the design means so much to me that I completed the whole thing despite last year ending in a "3". It's such a classic set that I started with 50 years ago -- even though I chucked those cards at the end of the summer. I used the Eddie Leon card as a post-topper once before, quite awhile ago (I like that post , most of what I wrote in there still applies). It's one of those ...

  Are you amused like me when an ebay seller throws some extra cards in with you order and tries to guess your interests by what you ordered? It doesn't happen a lot for me. For whatever reason, very few of the people I order from add extra cards. But a recent shipment of four 1976 Hostess needs did.   Three of the cards I ordered happened to be White Sox.   I didn't plan it that way. Each was ordered for a very specific reason, but the White Sox uniform wasn't one of them. For Terry Forster, I was upgrading my previous version of the card. For Jorge Orta, it is a short-print in the set and I nab those as quickly as I find them. For Rich Gossage, he's one of the more expensive cards in the set, so let's get that out of the way. I know those three cards ordered together makes me look like a White Sox team collector to someone from the outside. But the closest I've come to having an interest in the White Sox is when they were the parent club for the Buffalo Bisons...

It's a couple days after a card show and that's when the card sorting really hits its peak. I usually wait to do any kind of sorting until after a show and then add the cards I bought at the show to the other cards that have been waiting months for filing (I still have cards from my last show in September that need to be filed). So this is not the time to go searching for trades. But I've got to do what I've got to do. I didn't get any cards in the mail last week. And there were none today. It doesn't matter because card show, but still it's time to snap out of that funk. I just wrapped up a deal with Scott Crawford today. And I'm finally getting down to getting some cards together for Cardboard Clubhouse, Not Another Baseball Card Blog, 2 x 3 Heroes and Nachos Grande. But what about the rest of you guys? Yeah, that's big talk from someone who takes two months to get a card package together. But I need to get some cards out of my house. Spe...

This year marks the 40th anniversary of the 1977 Topps baseball set. It's an often-overlooked set, and when it's mentioned it's usually to address the rookie cards of Andre Dawson and Dale Murphy, which are tiny little images shared with three other tiny little images on each card. Sure, the '77 set also includes rookie cards for Bruce Sutter and Mark Fidrych, but I will always associate the '77 set with my introduction to three-pocket rack packs, pulling that Ellie Rodriguez card out of my first pack while sitting in the car waiting for my mom, and the series of trades made with several members of my sixth grade class, often while the teacher was conducting a lesson. The '77 set might contain more airbrushed cards than any other set, reflecting the first outbreak of free agency, and it marks the first appearance of the Blue Jays and Mariners. It also marks the first, and only, appearance of Chicago White Sox players in shorts. The White Sox's tea...

I remarked the other day that I missed everything that was on this card. That's almost true. I do miss seeing Carlton Fisk behind the plate. I do miss food issue cards with team logos prominently on display. I do miss Drake's cakes. I even miss those goofy-yet-functional '70s-style sun hats that folks in the stands are wearing. But if I'm being objective -- and not merely nostalgic -- I don't miss the uniforms the White Sox wore then. Sure, I like the idea of those uniforms, the time period of the crazy, everything-goes uniform style. But, really, the White Sox looked downright dorky when out on the field with another team that was wearing a regular uniform. It looked like they were playing a split-screen game, one-half from 1980 and the other half from 1911. This made me wince because, really, the White Sox were better than that. I like my established teams to wear classic uniforms. These uniforms do not change every 10 years or so. They remain basically...