Night Owl Cards

(Hello on Veterans Day weekend. On this Veterans Day I am remembering my dad, who passed away five months ago. While going through some of his things shortly afterward, I found a copy of a newspaper clipping. It was a report from the local paper about how he and eight other men bailed out of a flaming tanker plane before it crashed and exploded in Louisiana while he was in the Air Force. I didn't know a thing about that. Time for Cardboard Appreciation. This is the 286th in a series): Why in the world would I be appreciating a cardboard disaster like this item from Panini Chronicles, a set that seems hell bent on confusing the heck out of every collector and does it all without using a single major league logo? Well, first I'd say, Chronicles isn't all that bad if you can find it in your heart to find the set fascinating. I kind of do. All of the different themes and looks takes your mind off of the lack of logos and the trashman-appearance of the players. Plus...

I do not go along with the crowd. That's well-established. Both in the hobby and in life. For example, I do not take part in sales. This is very un-American of me, because wherever I go, inside of the hobby or out, there is someone mentioning how they "got a deal" on this or that. When I used to work in retail, there were legions of shoppers who'd wait for the weekly circular and then stampede to the mall to wipe out all the sale items before Sunday had ended. In the card hobby, I don't have to tell you it's all about finding a sale. Dollar boxes, quarter boxes, dime boxes, nickel boxes. Finding the best deal on ebay. Finding the best deal on your favorite online shopping site. Each year, my favorite site -- COMC -- announces several different sales. The most popular is the Black Friday sale. At that time of year, there is blog post after blog post showing off Black Friday purchases. But I've never taken part. It's not that I don't lik...

I am trying the plow through that worst work week of all work weeks: the week after a vacation week. That week, always trying, was exacerbated by a compacted and very busy high school sports schedule. As usual I feel like I'm being punished for daring to enjoy a few days off on my own, like someone assessed a week's worth of penalties for the crime of having off-time. I'm now serving my sentence in the box. So I've been struggling to get to my hobby all week with spotty success. You are allowed only a certain amount of cards in the sin bin. I pulled together two different card packages sent fairly recently that each contained some of the same cards. Here are the cards from Starting Nine : Here are the cards from The Collective Mind : You can see I have two to spare. These are the tarot card-themed inserts from Gypsy Queen this year. A lot of people love these. I'm not into them. They go with the circus-freak vibe of GQ the last couple of yea...

The Dodgers are cleaning up, on the field and off, and I'm posting about yesterday's news. That's how I roll. I think you know by now. I had planned to run an updated "Most Hall of Famers" post once the 2017 class was announced during the winter. But I promptly forgot about it until the Hall of Fame induction ceremony took place yesterday. The last dozen or so years I have watched the induction ceremony religiously. But yesterday I missed most of it. I think it's because most of the players that I grew up with, who are eligible for voting, have been inducted already. The classes are now starting to move completely into '90s ballplayers, which doesn't interest me nearly as much. The lone exception yesterday, of course, was Tim Raines. I was a teenager when Raines reached the major leagues. I followed his career through the '80s. He was part of the stolen base generation of the '60s, '70s and '80s. So, in honor of Raines' ...