Night Owl Cards

Someone posted a card on Twitter yesterday that I couldn't quite place for an instant. It was a card of a bunch of Expos posed together with the sun setting behind them and a wonderfully descriptive logo in the corner. And then I remembered: Ah, yes, its from my favorite Upper Deck set of all-time, the '93 set. There were all kinds of crazy, wild things going on inside the 1993 Upper Deck set -- INSIDE, the set, not outside , like today where interesting stuff is reserved for inserts and short-prints. Yes, '93 UD did have inserts, too, but the regular cards, the subset cards (remember those?) were so funky that you barely cared whether you saw the inserts. "Teammates/Team Stars" is one of the many subsets within '93 Upper Deck. The theme is simple: get some guys together from the same team for a photo and slap a goofy name and logo on the card to sum them up. Upper Deck did that for every team and made them as staged and dopey as possible. Bu...

(Late August is proving to be uglier than usual. The car repair payment I have to make probably means selling a few cards in my collection. That's not good. But neither is draining the savings. It's time for Cardboard Appreciation. This is the 272nd in a series): I'm hoping that this happens to some other team collectors besides me. I'm always thrown off by combo cards. Those old standbys of the 1950s and 1960s, resurrected about 10-15 years ago in a much less friendly fashion, prove to be elusive when I'm trying to complete my Dodgers team sets, mostly because I forget about them all the time. Take this wonderful item, which was sent to me by Jeff at Cardboard Catastrophes. Not even a month ago, I was convinced that I had gotten down to a single Sandy Koufax card to complete my 1958 Topps Dodgers set. It was a semi-triumphant moment. All of that work was well worth it to get within a Koufax of completing the '58 set. I boasted about it in fact. A...

I'm sad to say that this is the final post in this series where I show the Baseball Cards magazines that I saved from when I had a subscription to the magazine from 1982-85. I have eight of those magazines still and this is post No. 8. The final one. These posts have been a hoot. Not the scanning -- the scanning has been miserable -- but everything else. Because of these posts, I've read articles that I haven't read in more than 25 years. A lot of the information and opinions in those stories still hold true today, as we'll see here later. This particular magazine is from the fall of 1982. This is the first edition that came to my house after I sent in the subscription card. You might be able to make out the faded fingerprints on the image of the Jim Brown card up near the top right side. That's the sign of a well-handled magazine. The teasers on the left side of the cover promise an interesting issue, especially that "How To Buy Superstars For Penni...