Night Owl Cards

  Fans today should have no trouble identifying the top prospects in their favorite baseball franchise's system. Dozens -- maybe hundreds -- of sites on the internet devote countless words to every prospect on the way up. And, if you still chart your prospects through cards, you'll have no trouble there either. Any prospect who is anybody has appeared in Bowman for years before they even make the majors and if that somehow isn't the case, Topps and Panini will be sure to shove that player into a regular set, even multiple times, to make sure you know.   Ever since the late 1980s, and definitely since Bowman began devoting itself to prospects, figuring out which rookie is who and how good has been maybe the easiest thing to do in all of collecting. Just follow the noise and babble.   When I first began collecting as a kid, it wasn't this easy.   Unless you lived in a town with a minor league team, figuring out the top rookie prospects was a bit of a challenge, if anyo...

I received an email from Topps' media representative yesterday, Susan Lulgjuraj, otherwise known as "Sooz" to us collectors on Twitter and before that one-half of the dearly missed "A Cardboard Problem" blog. She's moved on to promoting Topps' initiatives while I'm still here blogging, often trying to figure out what the heck Topps is doing. Anyway, the email was an alert that Topps was going to announce its annual All-Star Rookie Cup team on the MLB Network at the ungodly hour of 9 a.m. I yawned a little night owl yawn and made a note to look up the team at a more reasonable time. Today's announced team includes the soon-to-be-named rookie of the year, Cody Bellinger. I've read a couple of assumptions that this means that Bellinger will feature a rookie cup in Topps' 2018 flagship set. But 2016 All-Star Rookie Cup member Tommy Joseph is still waiting for his rookie cup so nothing is automatic. If Bellinger does get his rookie ...

I've had a couple of people request that I do this post. I hesitated, most likely because I don't like being told what to do, but also because I just haven't been paying attention. This concerns 2017 Topps flagship and the set's jaw-dropping inability to adhere to one of its basic features for the majority of time flagship has been around. But because I wasn't paying attention, and hadn't bought very much flagship this year, I hadn't noticed. I also don't know if this has been addressed by any other blogs (oop, here is one mention now ). But onward I go, because I am at my core a base-set collector. Last fall, Topps announced its all-star rookie team . It's been an annual tradition for decades as far as I know. The players selected for that team show up in the following year's set with a little rookie cup on the front of their card (or if they started in the '60s, a big, honking trophy). This was the team for 2016: C - Gary Sanch...