Night Owl Cards

  It's almost nothing to own cards of retired players, so-called "legends cards," these days. Thanks to the MLB-Topps agreement, legends are included in virtually every current set. They're ubiquitous in inserts and in sets like Archives and Allen & Ginter. You can find cards of them for a quarter, which just doesn't seem right.   Maybe that's because I knew a different time. As a youngster collecting cards, my focus was solely on the players of the day. This was the 1970s and 1980s, and virtually all sets available, year after year, offered nothing but current players.   Cards of legends were mostly confined to past releases. Want a card of Willie Mays? Find someone dumb enough to trade you a card from the 1960s, because that's the only way you were going to get him.   Eventually I became aware of card issues from TCMA and Galasso and Laughlin. These were all oddball sets, not available at your store down the road, but they contained retired players. ...

  I don't have a lot of regrets about leaving the hobby between 1995-2005. Most of the cards issued at that time, I don't consider favorites and in many cases I can't even imagine wanting to buy a pack. About the only sets issued during my hobby hiatus that I could say I would have definitely collected, are the legends sets from that time period. The retro craze was all the rage about 20 years ago, and it's been a long time since we've seen sets like Topps Super Teams or Fleer Greats of the Game. Stupid lawyers. Between a glorious 10-year period that ranged approximately from 1999-2007, some of the greatest legends sets were issued. They continued the tradition of sets such as early '60s Fleer Greats, TCMA sets of the '70s and '80s, and the Ted Williams Company sets from '93 and '94.     Those sets were born out of the respective companies' inability to show photos of current players on cards, but the byproducts were what I consider masterpie...