Night Owl Cards

  Like many collectors I am completely over relic cards. When searching for a card I want, I'm never looking for a relic card. I don't list them among my wants, I don't consider them when I'm looking to complete a team set. To a slightly less degree, the same goes for autograph cards. I do search for them on occasion, but very rarely is it a card quest of mine. There isn't a single set issued today in which I'll say "ooh, I want that autograph."   My collecting background does not include chasing hits, so this is pretty much par for the course for me, but they're even more irrelevant than ever to me.   So when Johnny's Trading Spot shipped me two long boxes of Dodgers, about 75 of which contained cards with scribbles or embedded with cloth bits, my brain stared at them for a bit. Sure, some I really liked, but a bunch I honestly don't know what I'll do with them. For now, the best thing they're good for is a blog post. I went throu...

I entered one of Sports Card Info's many card contests a couple of weeks ago. Andrew's been holding these giveaways for probably as long as I've been blogging, but I rarely enter. Plus, it's one of those deals where if you comment on the post every day, you have a better chance of winning, and I never remember to comment more than once. My forgetfulness didn't matter this time though and I won the above Alex Verdugo "player-worn memorabilia" card! My enthusiasm aside, I think we're all past relic cards these days. The peak era for relics probably ended almost 10 years ago, and ever since we've been accumulating them absent-mindedly, knowing that they're probably not legitimate, a victim of our habits and nostalgia and ... I don't know, a difficult-to-shake fondness for laundry bits, I guess. I never go out of my way to obtain a relic card. Even when they were "the shit," as the kids-who-are-now-adults say, they were ne...

I received this bat relic card of Roy Campanella in the mail today. I knew it was coming. Jeff of Cardboard Catastrophes had emailed me and said that he had picked it up cheaply at a show and wondered if I wanted it. Of course I did. Relics may not mean what they once did, but relics of Hall of Fame legends will always mean something. It also happens to be my first relic card of Roy Campanella and I think it's about time this Dodger fan had one of those. The other card that Jeff picked up was also a Hall of Fame Brooklyn Dodger. But I owned that one already. This is one of three relic cards I own of Pee Wee Reese. It still seems crazy silly that I have THREE relic cards of one of the biggest legends in Dodgers history, but I certainly am not sad about that. These are the others: Being able to produce two Hall of Famers from one of the most famous teams to ever play, the 1952 Brooklyn Dodgers, instantly made me wonder how close I was to owning a relic card of...

A few weeks ago I told the sad tale of my sister-in-law buying me a repack box for Christmas. She actually unknowingly purchased a box that already had been purchased, pillaged, repackaged, returned -- no doubt for full credit -- and placed back on the shelf. When it arrived in my hands, it did not include the promised autograph anymore. All that was left was some Panini cards from five years ago. My theory is most of those Panini cards were in the repack box in the first place. Because that's what Fairfield -- the repack company -- likes to do. Most people understandably don't want anything to do with Panini baseball so the scammer returned those cards to the box after removing whatever hit was involved. I didn't think much about the dirty deed after writing that post, but that's the cool thing about having regular readers. Somebody else did think of it, and sent me a card to make up for getting scammed. This card arrived from Nick , and it is the most perf...

I've noticed over the years that some bloggers only post when they have something new to relate, either a new card acquisition, or something card-related that happened to them at the hobby shop, or some event in their life. Even though that's probably the better way to keep one sane, that's now how this blog operates. This ain't Facebook. I try to blog almost every day because I think of cards every day. Daily blogging takes thought, creativity, persistence, and I wish there could be new card events every day but there just isn't. So I try to find card-related things to offer to fill in the gaps between "look what I did!' Along those lines, I am very close to debuting the 100 Greatest Cards of the '70s countdown. I have just a handful of '70s cards left to review and then I will rank them (the ranking actually doesn't take long) You'll probably see the first post within the next two weeks. OK, now on to a few card events that have h...

Maybe about four years ago, I declared relic cards as past-their-prime, not-to-be-trusted and generally not collectible anymore. I said that they had lost their pull on me. I pared down my collection of Dodger relics and waited for relics to die an inglorious death. It didn't happen. Relic cards are still being made and still making their way into my collection. These two relics from 2016 Allen & Ginter arrived unannounced from Nachos Grande just last week. They're still making these things, huh? The difference from four years ago is that I don't pursue relic cards anymore and haven't for four years. I also think -- although I have nothing to base it on outside of my own collection -- that there aren't as many relic cards issued as there were seven or eight years ago. As an example, Adrian Gonzalez is a mid-level star that in the heyday of relicdom would have jersey cards that could clothe the earth. But this relic is just my second Adrian Gonzalez...

I think everyone can agree that the relic card isn't the thrill that it once was. I know that, after several incidents and rants over the past couple of years, I have stopped pursuing them. If I pull one from a pack -- and I can't remember the last time that happened -- I stop and stare for a second, maybe chuckle in an ironic way, and that's about it. The relic card is basically dead to me. But that's a fine thing to say when The Junior Junkie went out of his way to send me this Shawn Green relic (you'll see some really great cards from him on another post). So I need to say that this one is notable because it actually commemorates an event, Green hitting four home runs in a game on May 23, 2002. That's pretty cool. It's also cool because it gave me the opportunity to count up all my Shawn Green relics. I've always known that I have more relics of Green than any other player. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if there are more reli...