Night Owl Cards

  Here in the Northeast, August is still summer vacation. Hearing about people going back to school this week in the south or out west is disturbing and I'm grateful I have only known stepping into a classroom for the first time during September.   However, August is nothing great here either. I've written many times about "August dread" -- I've experienced it since I was a little kid. And with my job for the last 30-plus years, August remains the calm before the storm -- a month's worth of trying to squeeze in every bit of fun you can before the education system saps your will to live.   Also, August, for this house, is a month of less money (the education system pays the bills). I don't cut out card spending completely as I did during past Augusts, but I still need to watch the budget. I balance the lack of funds with the need for cards to dull the August edge -- card by card. Singles are the way to go this month, rather than boxes or packs.   So here ar...

  It's the summer traveling season. We're visiting or greeting visitors, yet the cards keep coming. It's sometimes difficult to focus. What do I write about -- this or this ?   But I've finally settled on a couple of player collections, a rare off-shoot of my main collecting goals. I think they're impressive in their own way.   I just added the Topps Now card for Clayton Kershaw's 3,000th strikeout. I just had to get the card and didn't pay all that much for it. These cards are almost nothing to look at, I don't like them any more than I did when Topps Now first became a thing. Just think if Topps created an interesting design for these, it might have all my money.   But that's just the lead-in card for this post. One of my player collecting projects is to get all of Kershaw's flagship gold cards. I wrote about finishing the run through 2022 a couple of years ago. And I finally decided to get back on that project. So recently, three more cards ha...

  All right, a quick post to get the bad taste of the last post out of my head.   Perhaps you've been wondering what I've been doing the last month? Yeah, you know about all the work. It's March and all that. But this is a baseball card blog! What else? Sure, you know people are sending me cards. That's plain as day. But what else? What am I -- individually -- doing to help my collection, my hobby? You know, anyone can ride a motorcycle up and down the street as a hobby -- there's plenty of that going on and will be for the next seven months -- but am I doing something actually constructive in my hobby? Am I contributing to my own collection?   I'm happy to say that I am -- even with precious little time.     Just recently I completed the 2006 Topps Dodgers' gold team set. Strangely Jose Cruz Jr. was the last card to arrive. But the '05 Dodgers weren't a desirable lot.   TCDB says Jose Valentin is also a needed Dodgers gold. He's mentioned as a ...

  Here's a fairly timely post. Yes, I've been watching the Olympics. It's partly my job and I'm so happy everything is happening six hours ahead of time. Makes things easier amid all the other obstacles I encounter these days when putting together an informative sports section. As I've said before, my favorite summer Olympic sports to watch are indoor volleyball (that beach thing has to go), track and field and archery. Track and field is the only one of those three NBC shows a lot, but I don't have the energy to deal with password hell to get on Peacock and see other sports. Maybe if baseball was actually in the Olympics I'd make the effort. But I like seeing the U.S. rack up gold medals no matter what the sport. And to stay with the theme, I've racked up another gold parallel team set. I wrote a post six months ago about trying to chase down gold parallels for Dodgers team sets for some of the recent Topps sets where I like what it did with the parall...

    This is post No. 5500 on the blog. Not that the number means all that much, unless you tell someone outside the hobby that you've written 5,500 blog posts about accumulating cards. That will probably draw some sort of reaction.   To them -- most of them anyway -- it's all just mindless accumulation. It's all stuff for the throw-out man eventually. But to me, and the people who read this -- this blog isn't FOR YOU, people who think cards are dumb -- every card added has meaning. It fits into a specific category that pays tribute to whatever thing -- baseball, player, year, hobby -- that means something to that collector.   There's probably no more appropriate time than to go through some recent pickups -- wildly unconnected -- that have been occupying space on my card desk for too long. Yeah it's another show-off post. I'm 5500 posts in now, I can't change.   This will illustrate exactly how many kinds of cards I think are important and also that I ...

  The bit-by-bit, card-here, card-there strategy of adding to my collection the first couple of months of the year continues for just a couple more weeks.   But you can accomplish a lot even when cards are just trickling in. Just the other day I completed the gold parallel team set for the 2008 Topps Dodgers.   No, that doesn't include the Update set, the Kershaw is still out there (I landed more than a couple of the Kershaw rookie, along with the gold-letter version back in 08-09, but the goldie eluded me when his cards were cheap).   But this feels like an accomplishment to me. I honestly don't know if I've completed the gold parallels for any of the other Dodgers team sets since gold parallels became a thing. So I decided to try to finish a few of them, beginning with some of the easier ones. 2008 falls into that category.   I had a lot of them already -- wow was I accumulating Dodgers like mad in '08 and '09 -- so I needed just six more. In order, I added De...