Night Owl Cards

  I was looking at a football card on one of the online shopping sites the other day. It wasn't anything I sought out, it just caught my eye. As often happens with football cards, I didn't know the set and I didn't know the player (I don't remember what card it was now). But I was curious about him and I quickly looked for what position he played. But there was no position listed on the front. That annoyed me (it doesn't take much). It's been a long time since I've written about positions on the front of baseball cards and I touched on this once awhile ago , so I figured it was time for another one. Let's do a little examination of sets that have not put the position on the front of their cards.   This will mostly cover Topps because as often happens with these historical card reviews, I get to the 1990s and it's just a mess and would take an army of spreadsheets to sort out, and, guys, I still have a full-time job.   But I will mention that Bowman p...

When 2018 Heritage came out a few weeks back, I was right in the middle of the collecting mob contrasting and comparing. That's what baseball card lovers with a taste for vintage do, each and every year. I spotted the difference in position designations right away and pointed those out. But I knew this wasn't a first-time occurrence and mentioned that I didn't know why Topps keeps doing this. Is there some sort of unspoken, top-secret reason for these changes? This is what I mean. Position designations in the 1969 Topps set provided the player's position: outfield. But 2018 Heritage, for whatever reason, chooses to use the position designation to provide the player's job title: outfielder. It gets very awkward with infielders. The '69 set sensibly abbreviated infield positions by using numbers, because Topps knew there was only so much territory in that colored circle. 2018 Heritage, though, doesn't care about limited territory because it ...

I have a lot of blog ideas bouncing around in my head and written on little pieces of paper. Most of them remain where they are, periodically called to the royal palace to be considered by the king (re: me) only to be discarded in disgust. But sometimes I'll be reading a blog and someone will touch on an idea or a portion of an idea and I take that as a sign. "Well, I have to do the post now. The blogging gods just sent a message." You lucky people. A few days ago, this Sonny Jackson card was featured on the exhaustive 1974 Topps - Pennant Fever set blog. I honestly don't know where wobs gets the time to do all that, but it does come in handy. On this particular post , he mentioned that Jackson may be the only player in the set with a position designation of shortstop-outfielder. Guess what? He is. I looked. I looked because I had wanted to do some sort of post about players who field multiple positions and being credited for it on cards. I can tell yo...