Night Owl Cards

The farther I get away from the age 18-49 demographic, the more the players that dominated the sports scene for seemingly forever fade out of the conversation.   You could have never convinced me in the 1970s and 1980s that guys like Reggie Jackson would slowly disappear, that their names would cease to be on everyone's lips, on every magazine cover, in every card set, in every sports column and TV broadcast.   Fewer and fewer sports fans can relate to the significant players and moments of the '70s and '80s and, yes, that means I have less to discuss on social media sites and the like. There are more modern players and moments that get all the attention and I sit on the sidelines either puzzled or with nothing to say.   One of those notables of the past who has become less and less significant with each passing year is Steve Garvey. I know a lot of people my age don't want to acknowledge that, but it's true. If someone isn't a Dodgers (or even Padres) fan and d...

  Like many collectors I am completely over relic cards. When searching for a card I want, I'm never looking for a relic card. I don't list them among my wants, I don't consider them when I'm looking to complete a team set. To a slightly less degree, the same goes for autograph cards. I do search for them on occasion, but very rarely is it a card quest of mine. There isn't a single set issued today in which I'll say "ooh, I want that autograph."   My collecting background does not include chasing hits, so this is pretty much par for the course for me, but they're even more irrelevant than ever to me.   So when Johnny's Trading Spot shipped me two long boxes of Dodgers, about 75 of which contained cards with scribbles or embedded with cloth bits, my brain stared at them for a bit. Sure, some I really liked, but a bunch I honestly don't know what I'll do with them. For now, the best thing they're good for is a blog post. I went throu...

  My blog has taken a little bit of a hit due to various life events of late. It's nothing bad. It's just busy. Vacations have played a part. Beckett magazine articles have played a part. I just sent off my second article in two weeks to them and I'm 10 minutes away from filing a bunch of images to them, too. Hopefully with the mag writing completed for now, I can put the focus on the blog. But there is more family visiting ahead that will likely scrap tomorrow's posting. And I've got like two or three work meetings coming up. Plus there are TCDB trades I need to jump on -- in three cases, my fellow traders have already sent envelopes and I haven't even packaged stuff yet! So, know that the posts appearing less often is not part of a new, mellow posting schedule (though that does sound nice). It's just stoopid life.   There are also the usual trade packages to get to, so let's get to one of those.   I received another package from Sportscards From The D...

  Just a simple post today because where's the time? I'm waiting for a couple of online orders to arrive, one from COMC and one from sportlots. I placed the sportlots order a number of days after the COMC one but I'm sure I'll see the sportlots order first, as COMC claims they're back but are they really? The sportlots order contains the Steve Garvey card you see here. I know the image is from the COMC website but the Trading Card Database image of this card is in rough shape. It's good to get a new Garvey card because they're a bit pesky to acquire as I've mentioned before. So many fans. He's been pretty accessible these many years after his playing career ended and I was listening to the TTMCast podcast a few days ago in which Garvey was the guest. He was such a pleasant interview as always. Garvey discussed cards a little bit and mentioned that some of his favorite cards to sign are from 1981 because that's the year the Dodgers won the World S...

I had intended to show off the incredible perfect storm of a mail day that came my way Monday and use many words to describe the wonderful, but the combination of Super Bowl prep, the start of the Olympics and the winter storm is kicking my butt. All I have for you is just one card from that haul. But it's a pretty good one. This arrived from Gavin of Baseball Card Breakdown . It was a thank you for being one of the main commenters on his 1991 Musicards Blog , which just celebrated its one-year anniversary.   It was nothing to comment on his blog. I love that set and have completed it. My appreciation for music is apparently a lot more intense than many of the card bloggers because there should be a lot more people commenting on that blog!   Anyway, Gavin announced he would be sending out something special for the top commenters. I expected something musical in nature, perhaps one of those special customs that he does so well.   But when I opened the elaborate packaging i...

  A little over three months ago I posted about a bunch of autographed Dodgers cards that I received from Rod of Padrographs. I totaled them with the Dodgers autos I already owned and it came to 188 different players for which I have autographs. That's pretty good for a collector who doesn't really pursue autographs. I used to, back in the early blog days, just because writing to former players that are among my favorites was fun. It was also work and all the other ways to get autographs that autograph seekers do -- hunt down players at the ballpark, stand in line for autographs -- don't appeal to me at all. But, like many things in life, just because I don't chase them doesn't mean I don't like them.   Since that time when I totaled the autos all up, I've received two more new-to-me player autos, Victor Gonzalez and Landon Knack. That brought me to 190 and just 10 off the 200 milestone that I mentioned in the earlier post. Then, sometime last week, I recei...

Last week I finished off an article about my Dodgers collection for the main Beckett Baseball magazine. I'm really not up on the main magazine -- the Vintage Collector magazine is more my speed -- but I believe Beckett Baseball has a regular series where they take a look at contributing writers' collections. I hope I'm not putting words in anyone else's mouth who has written a story like that for Beckett, but that's the easiest article in the world to write. The only problem for me was not prattling on for pages and pages. I was limited to a 1,000 words, but initially what I wrote was three times that (and could've been 10 times that). Fortunately, I edit for a living, so I cut it down to a tidy 995 relatively easily, even though I was writing about my babies. The surprising thing for me is that a lot of what was left in the article was about Ron Cey. I like to think I'm an equal-opportunity collector when it comes to the Dodgers -- sure, Ismael Valdez, I...