Night Owl Cards

  Twice a year I run through my doubles for that particular year's card products and pull any night cards that could find a spot in my night card binder.   I do that in the spring and then again in the fall when I'm filing away the cards for the year.   It's time for the first go-round for 2025 cards, the few that I have. As I've mentioned many times in the last 5-10 years, night cards aren't as fun these days because Topps crops cards too close and you rarely get to see the best elements of a traditional night card -- stadium lights, neon advertising, etc.   But I press on, because there are still empty slots ... many, many empty slots!   Here are the 2025 cards that make the binder so far:   117 - Orlando Arcia, 2025 Heritage   Fills an empty slot! Very exciting.     81 - Twins, set checklist, 2025 Topps   No-brainer, one of the most distinctive cards in flagship this year. Stadium lights and even a lit-up scoreboard! This card replace...

  This has been a weird holiday week as far as working my job. In general, holidays don't mean much in the journalism world, the news doesn't stop and newspapers come out every day (mostly). But my paper has always been good about holidays and I often am able to take some time off. Not this year. I worked on Christmas. Not unusual but not ritual either. I also worked on New Year's Day. Both of those are very common days to have off in the general work world. Also I did a little work on Christmas Eve and New Year's Eve even though I was technically off. Meanwhile, my work computer decided to stop working two days before Christmas. Apparently it wanted a vacation, too. And good luck getting someone to look at it during the holiday week. I've been working from home ever since. I could go on and on but to sum up, I feel like I'm the only one working the last 10 days. I'm a little sick of it. So what we have here is a lazy write-up on some cards that came to my d...

    I don't discuss night cards or publish weekly Awesome Night Card posts much anymore. One of the few mini-collections that I have is more of an under-the-radar card habit for me these days. But the night card binder is still going, maybe not as strongly but I still pull it out periodically to see what slots I can fill. It really is pretty when you open it up and look at the gleaming lights beaming from the pages. Recently, Max from the Starting Nine blog sent an assortment of cards catered to my interests and two of them were fantastically constructed night cards from this year's Stadium Club. Look at that Shed Long card above. Joy in prime time right there. Very cool. And I barely know who Shed Long is. So, you know the frankenset drill. I turn over the Shed Long card to see what number it is and see if it can fill a slot, or bump the other card out. Long is card No. 198 in 2020 Stadium Club. But there's someone in the way: Sorry, Shed, you're not going to unseat P...

Last week I did some seriously overdue reorganizing of the Night Card Binder. I may seem like I have it all together when it comes to night cards, but it's probably my most scattered collection. So, I started from the beginning, which is the actual binder itself. As I mentioned briefly last week, for the longest time, the color of the Night Card Binder has been ... white. Yes, white. What is wrong with me? So I took care of that. The Night Card Binder is now black as it should be: It's rather plain. I'll have to do something about adding some graphics or a drawing or the like to the front. But this is appropriate for now. Here is a look at the first page, which I have shown before: It is going to take a lot for anything to bust through those nine. With reorganizing I had to make a few hard choices. Cards that I thought were definite Night Card Binder additions, even Night Card Binder mainstays, got the boot. For example, these cards, which I bel...

It's incredibly easy to find night cards in current sets, and there's no better example than the most current of flagship offerings 2015 Topps. To underline just how available night cards are, terrific-sender-of-packages Dave shipped me a bunch of 2015 Topps night scenes amid the great selection of other cards he sent (I'm getting to those, I promise). I immediately went about determining whether they qualified for my night card binder, and I was pleasantly surprised to see how many made it. Let's relive the rundown. "Does it make the binder?": Yordano Ventura, #79. Yes Chris Carter, #246. No Starling Marte, #79. No Alexei Ramirez, #65. No Michael Bourn, #23. Yes Tyler Colvin, #245. No Brandon Phillips, #266. Yes Maikel Franco, #309. Yes Andrew Susac, #232. Yes Craig Gentry, #183. Yes Toronto Blue Jays, #13. Yes Atlanta Braves, #64. Yes New York Mets, #24. No (shouldn't have worn those hideous camos) Chase Utley, ...