Night Owl Cards

  With the way that Topps Heritage has dropped a lot of the traditions that made it so fun to collect, I kind of assumed/implied that every tribute used in the past was out the window. But that's not entirely the case.   The subsets from the chosen year still exist, the All-Star logos do, too. The design is the same -- um, sort of. And, I realized that Heritage is still matching card numbers, linking players who play on the respective team now with one who played on it then.   I don't know if it's happening as often as when I first did this comparison 12 or 13 years ago, probably not. But it's nice to know something is still right with this brand that's been the biggest disappointment of the 2026 card year for me so far.   I went through the modest amount of 2026 Heritage I have and found a handful of matches. I'll start with the obvious ones.   Each of the 2026 Heritage card shares its number with the 1977 Topps card. The italicizing of NL and removing the peri...

  In my continuing quest to plug the gaps as far as any baseball card set issued during my youth, I recently landed the 1980 Burger King Pitch, Hit & Run set.   Like the Burger King team sets of the late 1970s/1980, this set's design was produced by Topps and used the flagship design from the year of issue. As a youngster, I was well-aware of the Burger King team sets, but I don't recall knowing about the Pitch, Hit & Run set. It's possible that I had outgrown the advertising used for this set (I was 14) and it passed me by. I know I was too old to participate in Pitch, Hit & Run activities.   Still, this was a huge oversight on my part, this set is 100% filled with the players from my youth and it also features one of my all-time favorite aspects of cards from this time -- updates and variations -- spin-offs from the flagship set, whether related to changing teams or for no good reason at all.   My favorite aspect of sets like O-Pee-Chee is alterations f...