Night Owl Cards

I think the August-September edition of Beckett Vintage Collector magazine has been on store shelves for three weeks now and I'm just getting around to mentioning it here. My third article for Beckett Vintage is in the latest edition.  As usual, I had to have other collectors inform me of this. And then because there isn't an adequate bookstore within an hour of me, it took a few weeks to see the article in print for myself. I just picked up a copy yesterday while on a road trip. I'm getting a little tired of this. If I'm going to be IN the magazine, I should be the one letting people know I'm in there, right? I'm terrible at this pimping stuff. So in the next week or so -- when there's money -- I'll finally get a subscription to Beckett Vintage so it will arrive at my mailbox before someone can notify ol' clueless that he has another article in the issue. (Pro tip: the editors don't really tell you when your article is going to show)....

A post earlier today from Wrigley Wax got my attention. I am a sucker for helmets on baseball cards and even did a post a few years ago trying to figure out why I liked them so much. WW dug up the first Topps card to show a Cubs player wearing a helmet. I suppose if you run a Cubs blog that's what you got to do. I was surprised that there wasn't a helmeted Cub before 1963 until I considered that helmets weren't made mandatory for all players until 1958 (and not strictly enforced until 1970), and helmets most often appeared during games, which Topps didn't regularly shoot until the '70s. I quickly went through my collection to find the first Topps card of a Dodger wearing a helmet. I came up with 1962 Topps Larry Burright here, an extra careful chap, wearing a helmet while fielding grounders. I wasn't extra careful researching this though, so I'll have to double-check for the next helmet post. That's right, the next helmet post. I told you I li...

When I was executing my big card purchase a couple of weeks ago, I actually wrote out a plan of attack, much like I do at a card show. Normally, I don't do that for shopping online -- which gets me into trouble periodically. But I just have this attitude about online shopping. I want it to be just like how I shop in stores -- go, get item, pay, leave. Unfortunately, with the online route, there's too much oh-let-me-compare-this-with-that-and-how-much-is-that-and-what-about-this-and-oh-there's-something-about-this-here-and-if-I-combine-this-with- AHHHAAAHHHH-STOP IT!! But I made my list anyway and it worked out fairly well. One item right up there with my card goals for the year are 1975 Topps minis. But I left it off this shopping list. That's because so many good people have said they think they have some minis to send me. I'm not going to order minis and then wait for dupes to arrive in the mailbox. I'll just wait until my collecting buddies ship someth...

( Note: As of at least June of 2012, the links below now go to the Golden Giveway, making all my work pointless. Topps -- you suck). More than a year ago, when Topps' Million Card Giveaway was at a fever pitch, Wrigley Wax figured out a cool way for collectors to get on the site and search for every Topps card from 1952 through 2009.  I used that post obsessively when researching my own post topics. But a few weeks ago, something happened. The links that Wrigley Wax provided for each of the Topps years stopped working. If you click on the year, it takes you to the old Million Card Giveaway site, but the page is pretty much blank. At the top, there is the random name of a baseball superstar. I suppose that makes sense. Topps has moved on to the Diamond Giveaway extravaganza, with a whole new site that is much like the Million Card site, except with a diamond ring theme. But I wondered if Topps had continued to store images of all of its cards on the Diamond G...

Paul of Wrigley Wax recently sent me four cards from the 1971 Topps set off my want list, including one extremely key item. It's the Aqua Velva Man himself. With the addition of Petey, I'm really down to only Clemente and Mays as the cards that may take some doing in order to complete the set. Of course, there are always some of the high numbers, but those don't worry me too much. Also, with the addition of four more cards, I now have 695 from the set, which is 92.4 percent complete. That statistic makes me very giddy. I feel like I should say more about the Rose card, but I've just completed two exhausting, mind-boggling days at work and my ability to think coherently is severely impaired. But I really should show the other cards. So here they are: This is a card that Wrigley Wax should know well. I'm wondering if he can tell me what the heck Fergie is wearing under his jersey. It looks like some sort of cut-off warm-up jacket that features an ...

Short post here. I'm having a heck of a time getting through to comment on some people's blogs. The word verification thingy just sits on "loading ..." until I run out of patience and give up. Anyone else having this issue? Anyone else having this issue commenting on my blog? So, I'm just going to put my comments here, and hope the bloggers find them. To 1972 Topps Baseball : I'm pretty sure that's Horace Clarke in the photo. And thanks for the rundown on Tommy Davis. I never had a handle on why he bounced from team to team, other than the injury. I kind of wish I was around for the '62 season, that must've been something to see. But then I would have had to suffer through Stan Williams. So, I guess it's best that I wasn't around. To Grand Cards : I've never been in that situation before. But if I was, I'd probably have to consider how much "older" the other cards were. If the cards were only 5 years old and not particula...