Night Owl Cards

  In my continuing quest to plug the gaps as far as any baseball card set issued during my youth, I recently landed the 1980 Burger King Pitch, Hit & Run set.   Like the Burger King team sets of the late 1970s/1980, this set's design was produced by Topps and used the flagship design from the year of issue. As a youngster, I was well-aware of the Burger King team sets, but I don't recall knowing about the Pitch, Hit & Run set. It's possible that I had outgrown the advertising used for this set (I was 14) and it passed me by. I know I was too old to participate in Pitch, Hit & Run activities.   Still, this was a huge oversight on my part, this set is 100% filled with the players from my youth and it also features one of my all-time favorite aspects of cards from this time -- updates and variations -- spin-offs from the flagship set, whether related to changing teams or for no good reason at all.   My favorite aspect of sets like O-Pee-Chee is alterations f...

  For the first five years of this blog, there was nothing more mind-blowing to me than communicating and trading with collectors from around the world, specifically overseas.   England, France, Australia, Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, I couldn't believe the reach of the blog and how many different people collected baseball cards! I connected with many of them and traded multiple times with some.   Then, slowly, each of them disappeared from the blog space, often without a trace, until it's now just me and some of my Canadian friends.   One collector, though, has turned back the clock, at least for now, by moving from the States back to Japan. Kenny, a.k.a., Zippy Zappy , has been downsizing and refocusing his collection and sending out cards to folks who could use them more than he can.   I received an envelope from Japan a few weeks ago with some cards, and then yesterday a big, fat package from Japan Post was deposited on a chair on my porch. Well, well, t...

  Forty years ago, Topps and Kmart teamed up to release the first boxed set through a retail chain, which touched off those now familiar and ubiquitous sets from Topps, Fleer and many department stores that lasted through the 1980s. But the 1982 Kmart set was unique when it came out. I know. I was there. My brother worked at Kmart at the time. One day he came home from work to tell his fellow baseball-card-addicted brothers that Kmart was selling some sort of new Topps set in individual boxes. We were intrigued. Everything about this was new. A 44-card set all in one mini box? Never heard of such a thing. You can only get them in one particular department store? Wild. I was instantly jealous of my brother. He had access . My brother picked up a box almost immediately. We could afford them even on our paltry salaries. I remember each box costing $1.97.   But getting a box was more difficult for me. I don't remember what time of year it was but maybe I had school to go to, and I...