Night Owl Cards

A couple of years ago, Topps decided to number the first few cards of its flagship set according to the uniform numbers of the players. Anthony Rizzo wore No. 44 so his card number was 44, Andre Ethier wore No. 16 so his card number was 16, etc. This is what is known as "being cute". But it was a conversation starter (boy, was it ever), and it enabled Topps to kick off its flagship with star power, or what I like to call "nine-pocket power". Because the established players often wear numbers as low on the numerical scale as possible, the first nine cards in the 2013 set overflows with notable players as you can see here. They're not as notable as they could be because there are stars who wear double digit numbers, too, but in general, this page has significantly above-average nine-pocket power. And it provokes the question, since a lot of collectors operate in a binder-and-page world: what's the best group of nine consecutively numbered cards? The...