Night Owl Cards

  The internet has a great way of providing something you have always wanted, or never even imagined possible ... and then eventually ruining it.   I experienced this great disappointment in duplicate in 2025. Two sites, so entrenched in my entertainment preferences for so many years, had evolved so far away from what I had valued them for that I could no longer ignore it.   I am struggling now to separate myself from one of them, which is Spotify. I have used the streaming site daily for the last four or five years, it has been where I discover new music and how I determine my favorite songs and albums of the year. So getting away from that and finding a new option (I'm trying Tidal right now but it is not cooperating with me) is going to take awhile.   The other site I hope is more of a clean break. In fact, I have already declared in multiple places that I have made my final order on COMC. I hope that remains true.   I have been ordering from COMC since late ...

  I'll say one thing for March, it's never not interesting.   I probably go on way too much about this month, but it keeps coming up with new and irritating ways to mess with my life. And I have a story to illustrate.   Since it's March, we're in the thick of state high school basketball playoffs, along with collegiate hockey playoffs and, heck let's start the spring season earlier and earlier because there's nothing else going on this month. It's always the busiest month at work and getting busier.   A co-worker was scheduled to work Thursday, Friday and Saturday and travel to cover our basketball teams in state play two of those days. On Friday, he sent a text saying he had a cold and wouldn't be in Thursday, he'd work from home. OK, no problem, nothing to cover that day. But late that night, I realized he did no work from home at all, and I had to do it, because we've been shorthanded since 2023 and we've got only two guys.   Friday came a...

  Three years ago, Topps put a card of Giants outfielder Mike Yastrzemski in its 2022 flagship set and spelled his name wrong.   "Yastrzemksi"   It was amusing and annoying -- I mean, how --  how could Topps misspell a name linked in baseball lore, a Hall of Fame name? Sure Mike Yastrzemski was just a kid, but his grandfather was an MVP and won the Triple Crown! He is legend among generations of Red Sox fans. What the hell?  I have a specific perspective when it comes to spelling names. My job is to publish the names of local athletes almost every day and to edit all sports names before they appear in the next day's newspaper. I have done this for decades and I have watched as players' names have grown more bizarre and more difficult to spell. Yet, every day, we try to get them right.   Sometimes they are wrong -- often this is because the coach doesn't care enough to spell it right on the roster. Sometimes, it's us, we confuse a player with his older gradu...

  Topps released Heritage this week. You're going to have to wait until I can use my Target gift card on some though before I offer an actual rundown of the set. I've been saving that gift card since Christmas -- something I almost never do -- specifically for Heritage. This year's set is using the 1974 Topps design, and although Topps has beaten every past design into irrelevance by throwing them into Archives and a thousand inserts each year, this year's Heritage still meant something to me. Cards from the '74 set are the first ones I ever owned. (Yes, we are now getting into I AM OLD Heritage territory). The story has been told since the first posts on my blog but one day in 1974, my mom came home from the grocery store and handed me, I was 8, and my brother, he was 7, a cello pack of '74 Topps. To this day, I still remember the excitement of seeing certain cards from that set -- Eddie Leon, Aurelio Rodriguez, Tommy John -- cards can transport you to a specif...

  The trouble with Twitter is it's so damn topical. We always have to discuss the hobby issues of the day and fire our opinions out there for anyone to view and -- well, I can be opinionated sometimes and also sometimes those thoughts don't line up with other people's opinions. This isn't some firestorm issue. Nobody blocked me (I don't think) or took away my account. It's just a hobby topic and one that's come up periodically. It was the final question on another CardChat by former blogger Sooz. The topic for the chat was "base cards" and the final question, asked somewhat jokingly, was "do you throw base cards in the garbage?" My answer to that was, "yes," but only in some very few instances. But plenty of people said no. And plenty of people were horrified by the question. "Blasphemy!" they said. "People who do this should be fined!" "Fucking monsters!" Their words, not mine. I rolled my eyes. Re...

  I stopped by Walgreens last week for a couple of items. As I almost always do, I swung by the toy aisle to see if there were any repacks. There haven't been any cards there practically since the pandemic, but habits. I've grabbed so many repacks from Walgreens in the past. One of these days they're gonna return. I reached the middle of the aisle, the customary spot for cards, and in place of the usual hooks and absence of product was this: Cards -- what few there are -- locked in a case. My first instinct was to laugh. Finally, Walgreens has something other than repacks, an actual hanger box of this year's Heritage, and it's in a locked glass case. I was also baffled. This store hasn't featured cards in months, possibly years, Is loss prevention pertaining to trading cards really a big deal for them? I figured it had to be corporate policy, across all the Walgreens, or at least those in the region or something. So I took a trip across town a couple days later ...

  This post is going to meander a bit, but it's been a long time since a comment on my blog affected me like this.   I can't remember the last time someone had a meltdown in the comments about something I wrote -- maybe that MLB scout that one time when I dared to say I didn't want cards of scouts? -- but it doesn't happen very often.   In a single comment I was called "old," a "whiner" (twice!), a "complainer" and "childish." I don't know why someone can't just simply stop reading. It's the first time that someone actually announced that they were going to stop reading my blog.   I've gotten the "you complain too much" complaint before (it's interesting when people complain about complainers, which is what I'm doing here, too). I usually dismiss it. More often, when I go off on a rant, I then receive comments about how amused they are about it, and that it's when I'm at my best, and that ...