Night Owl Cards

  Ever since the local monthly show (and many other shows throughout the country) has become overrun with TCG cards I've debated skipping or at least not automatically attending every month. It's become less and less productive over the past 9 months to a year.   But like they say in the majors, "that's why you play the game." I was pretty surprised when I walked into the usual hall Saturday.   First, it was packed. I normally attend closer to 1 p.m. when typically the crowd has thinned out. But I could tell driving into the parking lot that there were still many people there. Second, the show was overwhelmingly sports cards. Any Pokemon, Magic, etc. seemed limited to a handful of tables. I don't know what caused the sudden shift back to sports cards but I was glad I got up off my recliner.   The change affected my mood more than my shopping. The tables were still overrun with graded football and basketball and I'm sure I heard "PSA" uttered 25-5...

  This is the giveaway post featuring the extras from my winnings from The Diamond King vintage giveaway on his blog last month.   I'll reveal the cards I'm giving away and the entry instructions at the end of the post, so you greedy grubbies can scroll right to the end if you like.   But I wanted to mention that DK's giveaway also encouraged participants to send cards out themselves. This is something I still do, even after 18 years, though not as often the last 5 or 6 years (still there are cards on my desk right now that are waiting for packaging and sending, as it's always been). But Kevin seemed to strike a nerve as I was the beneficiary of three separate card sends that I believe were related to The Diamond King's request.   First let's see some cards I received from gcrl from cards as I see them . Neither of us needs instructions for sending out cards, especially to fellow Dodger fans, but we'll take any excuse!   Goodies of the parallel kind. Will g...

This is my favorite card recognizing a Dodger no-hitter. Donruss also put one out of Kevin Gross in its 1993 set, but it scans like crap, and the Score one lays it all out for you. Who, what, when, where. It's there. With the first no-hitter of the season pitched last night (yes, I was working and thank goodness for earlier Saturday start times on the west coast), I looked back on which cards I have that recognize Dodgers no-hitters. There aren't a lot of them. If you pitched a no-hitter before the 1990s, good luck, unless you're Sandy Koufax. Really, the boom in no-hitter cards, recognizing personal achievement on the field, was in the '90s. Score, again, brought it to the forefront with its marvelous no-hitter subset , acknowledging the surge in no-hitters during the 1990 season. The Kevin Gross card followed two years later. The next Dodgers no-hitter happened in July of 1995 when Ramon Martinez pitched one against the Marlins. This is what I have t...

This is my 4,000th post. As usual with milestones like these, it's not completely accurate. I've written more than 4,000 posts on this blog. I've deleted a few. Probably not as many as you'd think. Less than 10, I'll bet. I probably should have deleted more. In fact, I know I should have. But who has the time? I know I don't. I don't even have the time to look back on what I've written so I make sure I don't repeat myself. I loathe repeating myself. And I've said that before. So I am now loathing what I am writing. But anyway ... 4,000 posts. That means many things. It means I've been doing this too long. It means I've stopped "being relevant," whatever that means. It means I don't care. It means I'm cranky and getting crankier. It means, yes it definitely means, I have a lot of cards. It also means that I not only forget the things I've written, but the things I've done. These are a...

The start of the busiest period of the entire work year began this week. This weekend is packed with sports chaos, and I expect every week and weekend to be like that until late March. You don't notice the bedlam here because I try to keep it away from the blog as much as possible. Good ol' night owl just keeps posting as much as he can. But it wreaks havoc in other hobby ways. The organization of my collection is always a disaster at this time of year. I have trouble sending cards out to people. If I can even get cards packaged, the packages often sit there lonely for sometimes weeks. And, every once in awhile, I throw out a rambling post like this with no cohesive thought. The cards are deserving of more, but sometimes a dude's got to eat and pay bills and figure out why the car suddenly sounds like a chipmunk stuck in the engine, you know? So let's just accept the disarray. Above is a signed card of the recently deceased Doug Harvey. I received it from M...

No matter what you're talking about, from a very young age, one million is a lot. "I'll bet you a million dollars!" "Not in a million years!" Two million is even more than that. Unless you're a popular youtube video or a major league baseball player, two million is almost unfathomable. Yet, this blog went over two million views last week. Actually, it doesn't mean a lot, just that I've been doing this a long time. A quarter of the views were probably Russian robots in late 2016 and another quarter are probably me. But anyway, it's an excuse to hold a contest giveaway. And now you're instantly interested. I figured that I wouldn't offer anything new on store shelves as the prize. There's already too much overemphasis on the newest on the usual social media sites anyway (pssst, they're trying to SELL you something). Instead, the prize is going to be one card that has eluded your collection. What is a card tha...

I will be announcing the winner of my anniversary contest in this post, but I wanted to clear off one side of my desk first. This is the last remaining trade package on the card desk. That means I have to get my butt in gear and get the cards on the opposite side of the desk out to people. The rest of this week, though, is looking fairly grim for that kind of frivolity. Anyway, these cards are from Twitter pal, Will. He sent very recent and very needed cards from 2016. I have neglected 2016 cards so much. There was a selection of needs from a variety of products. Let's take a look: Some Bowman. Only Kershaw and Puig are still with the Dodgers. #ThanksBowman. Some Allen & Ginter. These are from the retail-only insert set, I think. I get these confused with the Numbers Game inserts, which tells you how necessary it was to create both insert sets. Some Stadium Club. This just leaves three Dodgers cards remaining for the team set: Kershaw, Koufax and Jacki...