Night Owl Cards

  I haven't done much with my 1987 Fleer set build. It's the only '80s Fleer set that I haven't completed, yet I've been stuck on 68% finished for awhile.   I haven't bothered to make a want list, either here or on TCDB. I sure don't feel like trading for it, and buying the whole set online would give me 450-plus doubles and there's just no time in my life for a 1987 Fleer art project.   So what I do have of the set is just kind of sitting there waiting. I thought I'd throw it a bone and point out one of the plus-aspects of the set, other than its cool look and wonderfully descriptive "blue freeze pop" Define the Design set name.   This means we're going to have to turn the cards over to the back, so I hope you can handle that.   1987 Fleer was the beginning of Fleer's comic era. I know it's just a little cartoon batter or pitcher squeezed at the bottom of the card and repeated over and over on card after card, but as someone wh...

We are approaching that time of year on the television schedule when prime time programming slips into "reruns." I don't know how much that means to people anymore, given the many different ways we now have to consume entertainment. I don't even know if people say "reruns" anymore. I don't even know if it's a big deal. It's nothing to watch the same movie over and over and over and over again these days. And then there is baseball card collecting, where we clamor for reruns. This never used to be the way. I can only imagine if I was collecting in 1980 and Topps threw a design from 1957 at me. It would instantly be my least favorite card because this wasn't NEW . Now there are entire sets devoted to reruns, none more obvious than Archives, which is rerun after rerun after rerun. Archives even does reruns of its reruns (i.e. using a past Topps design that it's already used). This is both very annoying and probably testament to how...

Usually when I do these baseball card cartoon posts, I whine about how cartoons need to return to the backs of baseball cards, how I actually learned things off the backs of baseball cards, how if one of the 14 kids in the United States left collecting baseball cards had cartoons to read on the backs then maybe we wouldn't be finishing 110th -- just behind Slovenia -- in the ability to repeat semi-relevant baseball trivia to our co-workers. But I'm not going to do that. Instead, it will be merely implied. I was just going to mention that I have known by heart the number of times that Babe Ruth walked in his career ever since I pulled Ellie Rodriguez's card out of a rack pack in 1977. It was the first card I pulled, it was a Dodger, and I know that caricature Babe Ruth scowl anywhere. But not all of the cartoons on the backs of baseball cards were meant to give you knowledge about the game. Sometimes the drawings helped you get to know the players. For example, R...

I enjoy looking at baseball card cartoons almost as much as anything else having to do with this hobby. That's why I can't for the life of me understand why cartoons don't show up on the back of baseball cards every stinking year. And don't come at me with Heritage. We all know they recycle the same 12 cartoon images each year. As I've said many times, I learned a whole lot looking at the cartoons on the back of my cards while growing up in the '70s. I often wonder if kids who grew up with cards in the '80s learned as much because, wow, that was a decade barren of cartoon images. One of the sets where you could learn the most was the 1976 Topps set. The cartoons may not have been as interesting in '76 as they were in 1974 or 1977, but they were packed with archaic facts. For example: I knew this factoid before I even knew who Wes Parker, Jim Lefebvre, Maury Wills and Junior Gilliam were. And I have the 1976 set to thank. That's a va...