Night Owl Cards

  Johnny's Trading Spot sent me a big box of Dodgers-and-such a little more than a month ago. It was so large that it took me three posts to go through . Well, apparently he wasn't done because another box of cards showed up a week or two ago. It was mostly Dodgers this time. As I've said before, Johnny sure has a lot of Dodgers for a Braves fan. I can tell he's cutting back -- maybe not enough for my taste -- because of the very obvious former collections that I've received. This is the most notable one: Even more Yasiel Puigs. And these are just the ones that I needed. I'm a bit conflicted by this, firstly a little embarrassed that I may not have had as many Yasiel Puigs as a Braves fan and secondly a little scared that Puig is shooting too far up my TCDB list of the player with the most Dodgers. (He's 26th now, even after the last two sends from John). But that wasn't the only hand-me-down cards I welcomed into my collection.   Johnny just mentione...

  I've been teasing the big box Johnny's Trading Spot sent for a couple of posts now, but now it's time to get everything out of the way. There is so much here that it will still take me a couple of weeks to get it all into my collection -- or into the dupes pile where half of it will go. Here are the two stacks of mostly needs after all the dupes had been filtered. The Dodgers and a few random baseball cards are on the left, the Bills are on the right. As I've mentioned before, I don't really collect Bills cards anymore, save for the ones when I was covering the team (junk wax era, basically) and earlier stuff from '70s and '60s. I've even stopped with the current Bills cards, there are just too much and pro football cards' obsession with shiny is just not doing it for me. So who knows what I'll do with that stack on the right. But let's focus on WHAT I NEED.   Non-Dodgers stuff first. These are all the 2023 Allen & Ginter cards I neede...

  The trouble with Twitter is it's so damn topical. We always have to discuss the hobby issues of the day and fire our opinions out there for anyone to view and -- well, I can be opinionated sometimes and also sometimes those thoughts don't line up with other people's opinions. This isn't some firestorm issue. Nobody blocked me (I don't think) or took away my account. It's just a hobby topic and one that's come up periodically. It was the final question on another CardChat by former blogger Sooz. The topic for the chat was "base cards" and the final question, asked somewhat jokingly, was "do you throw base cards in the garbage?" My answer to that was, "yes," but only in some very few instances. But plenty of people said no. And plenty of people were horrified by the question. "Blasphemy!" they said. "People who do this should be fined!" "Fucking monsters!" Their words, not mine. I rolled my eyes. Re...

  For years, decades upon decades really, I had no idea how many Dodgers cards I had.   Until maybe 10 years ago, I couldn't be bothered with totaling them up. But then I started the process and a couple of years ago I arrived at a total and have been watching it grow ever since.   So I've known I've been coming up on a team-collecting milestone for quite awhile. I wrote about it in that Beckett magazine article about my pursuit of as many Dodgers cards as I can: I wrote that last fall, knowing the day would be coming. It arrived last week. I received a power-packed envelope from reader Simpson. He was one of the winners in the 5,000-post/5,000-card giveaway. I don't expect anything back from anyone from this giveaway, but the cards sure were pretty. And they got me to that milestone! Let's count them in order of how I pulled them out of the envelope: 24,998 This is one of the medallion things from 2015 when Topps was throwing the "first home run" theme at...