Night Owl Cards

  Set collectors know that it takes a long time to get to the completion finish line. For example, I'm very close to finishing off a set (probably in the next couple days) that has taken seven years to finish -- and it took even longer if you count those random cards from the set I had as a youth. But, yeah, seven years is nothing in the set-collecting world. I admit, I don't think about the length of time much. I probably wouldn't collect sets as avidly if I focused on the duration all the time. I do, however, note mini-milestones along the way to completion. I need those little celebrations and it provides a boost to keep going. For example, the card above is the final card I needed from the non-SP portion of the 2024 Topps Heritage set. Yay, mini-milestone! It arrived from the Shlabotnik Report . (I think that may be the first time I've received cards from him, which is wild). The same card also arrived again today, which I'll get to. Isn't that always the wa...

That is my Mike Trout rookie card. Most days it sits under lock-and-key because I just know there are thieves lurking in the bushes so they can steal it from me. Even when I pull it out for blog occasions like this one, I don't like scanning it outside of its top-loader. I'd do it if I had to -- I don't care about it that much -- but all it will take is one trip to ebay to see how much it is selling for and I suddenly feel like hiring armed guards. My goal is to sell this card someday and I probably would have sold it already, but I've held on to it because I wasn't done with the 2011 Topps Update set yet. No, I haven't completed the 2011 Update set -- no plans to do that -- but there was one card from that set that I wanted above any other one and it took ages for me to get it. The Matt Kemp Toppstown card from that set lounged on my Nebulous 9 list longer than any other card that I've placed on there. But if you look over at the Nebulous 9 now, ...

When I first returned to the modern card world in 2006, I knew a "hit" as a card autographed by a player or a card containing some bit of baseball residue, usually a piece of a player's uniform. As the years moved along, that definition of "hit" expanded to items that didn't seem all that special to me, such as "manufactured" relics, which came from the same source of all of other cards, the card manufacturer. Then I started watching people go ape over buybacks, like pulling a 1977 Topps card with a stamp on it was a reason to buy a hobby box. "Hit" means a wide variety of things now. And you can be congratulated for pulling something that you didn't even know was worth congratulations. The above card contains one of those very congratulation messages on the back. It comes from last year's Topps Big League set. This is considered a "reproduction" because there are 1/1 versions of each of these, which I assu...

I scheduled kind of a bummer of a post for today, which still may be coming, that depends entirely on the distributors to my local big-box stores. Fortunately, things are a little more upbeat around here today because the 2018 Allen and Ginter checklist is out! We've reached the baseball card crunch period of the season. The new Big League Baseball set supposedly hit streets today. I still haven't seen Stadium Club, which released a couple of weeks ago. Series 2 isn't a month old. And now Allen and Ginter is scheduled for release next week. As much as I like Stadium Club and as promising as Big League Baseball is, my heart remains with A&G. The checklist release is the most interesting of the season and this year is no exception. The baseball players are the same as usual, a mix of current stars, rookies and legendary players (the legends are getting pretty damn stale, but that's a post for another time). But the excitement lies with the non-ballplayers a...

I don't "pal around" with people. It's not my nature. I don't go out with the boys for drinks. I don't spend Saturdays playing golf. I like things quiet and, mostly, on my own. This shows itself on the blogs, too. While some bloggers like to pal around with certain others, I try to give equal time to everyone (given the number of blogs there are, that's difficult). And I try to trade with just about every blogger who wants to trade. But even though I don't go out of my way to be "chummy," I do have trading pals. I call them my "card buds," collectors who either lightly blog or don't blog at all, yet still send me cards. I feel I've made a real connection with those people, something that goes beyond the traditional blog trade. Angus of Dawg Day Cards is one example. (Hey! He finally blogged again today !) He's a special exception because we've roamed through card shows together a couple of times. That...

A couple of weeks ago I found some spare money that was just enough to order a few inexpensive cards off of my favorite baseball card marketplace. It wasn't until I received the package in the mail a few days ago that I realized how many of the cards that I ordered were oddballs. I've always gravitated toward oddballs, but my main missions in collecting usually involve completing major sets. This package appears to signal some shift in my thinking. I did order some mainstream cards, but they were by far the least interesting to me. Instead I found much more appeal in stuff like the 1976 SSPC Gene Hiser above. I ordered it because the Hiser in my SSPC set contains a rip through it. So let's get the mainstream stuff out of the way so I can bore you all with my oddball interests. Cards off the Nebulous 9 list. Every last one sat on that list for a mystifying long time, although none more so than the Swing Man Mondesi. Here is a tepid response to my...