Night Owl Cards

  This past weekend wasn't as restful as I expected it to be. First, work followed me into the weekend, which is always a delight. When you're younger this doesn't bother you as much, but when you're older, it makes you need to take a nap. Then there were weekend responsibilities that sometimes can be fun, but these weren't. They involved getting up early.  Even the baseball-viewing part took more investment than usual. MLB had to throw the Dodgers and the Yankees against each other and TV had to freak out about it -- hey did you know the Yankees had someone named Babe Ruth play for them? Did you know the Dodgers had someone named Jackie Robinson play for them? And also I had to view my team playing in Yankee Stadium, which is so annoying. Let's boo Shohei Ohtani every time he bats for no reason at all. At least Saturday was the highlight of my baseball season.   I ended up sleeping 10 hours last night to recuperate from the weekend. And in the process of sleepi...

  Like I mentioned a couple of week ago, the 1975 Topps buyback game has reached a new level since 2024 Heritage came out. What has been mostly a down-low pursuit, in which I have been grabbing buybacks here and there for the last seven years sometimes at a rate of a handful per year, is now like chasing buybacks on speed. New '75 buybacks, buybacks that I need -- not the same damn Bobby Heise buyback over and over -- are up for sale all over ebay. And I've been on that stupid site at a rate the last few weeks that I haven't been on since before the blog had begun. I don't like being on ebay that much, especially when it comes to bidding. I already have a low impression of humanity without having to go through that. But for chasing down more buybacks from my favorite set of all-time? Sure, I'll wallow. Before Heritage came out, I owned 481 of the 660 cards in the set in buyback form. I knew that with what I saw available, I could get to 500 pretty quickly. So join...

  Today I received the cards from my first Trading Card Database trade. I know. You thought I'd never do this. Well, I sure didn't expect it to happen so quickly, but I never said I'd never trade on the site. I said it wasn't a priority. Cataloging my collection is the best part of that site in my wee opinion. If trades come, I am open to them. I've started placing some of my extra inventory on the site. The vast majority of that are Dodger cards and it's going to take me probably years to add it all. So I knew that maybe somebody might see something they want, but I had no idea how soon that would happen. It could've been months from now as far as my thinking. But someone with the handle "yrrcwc" reached out with a minor trade proposal and it was a no-brainer for me. Three of my 2002 Upper Deck Dodgers extras for five cards I need from 2005 Topps. That's why people transact on there. Duh. These are the cards that I landed: Not very thrilling. ...

 The blog view counter turned over this morning when I wasn't looking. 4 million served. Long after some declared card blogging dead and that Blogger was hanging us out to dry, NOC is still here, providing card collecting content and assorted ridiculousness. I thank you for still reading. You are the true believers. I'll be back tomorrow with something thoughtful -- like a trade post. (P.S.: We're at 4,000,121)

  This is the first Clayton Kershaw card to appear on Night Owl Cards. It showed up on Nov. 6, 2008. Since then, I've charted my growing Kershaw collection. If you had no life and absolutely nothing to do, you could go through past NOC posts and find mentions of each Kershaw card milestone as I reached it. I may list "player collector" third under "set collector" and "team collector" in my hobby bio, but I admit, I've done better adding Kershaw cards in the last year or two than I have completing sets. That's mostly because of inflated prices but also player-collecting is a lot easier. All you need to do is add random cards with your guy on them, and if your player is a star, the cards are everywhere. You don't even have to sweat it until you've gotten, oh, maybe 80 percent of them, and then it gets tough as hell.   Also, zeroing in on a milestone helped spur me along. One thousand, I'm assuming, is the gold standard for collecting ...

  For years, decades upon decades really, I had no idea how many Dodgers cards I had.   Until maybe 10 years ago, I couldn't be bothered with totaling them up. But then I started the process and a couple of years ago I arrived at a total and have been watching it grow ever since.   So I've known I've been coming up on a team-collecting milestone for quite awhile. I wrote about it in that Beckett magazine article about my pursuit of as many Dodgers cards as I can: I wrote that last fall, knowing the day would be coming. It arrived last week. I received a power-packed envelope from reader Simpson. He was one of the winners in the 5,000-post/5,000-card giveaway. I don't expect anything back from anyone from this giveaway, but the cards sure were pretty. And they got me to that milestone! Let's count them in order of how I pulled them out of the envelope: 24,998 This is one of the medallion things from 2015 when Topps was throwing the "first home run" theme at...