Night Owl Cards

  I made one of my six-times-a-year visits to Walmart on Sunday. I'd like it to be less than that, but I've documented the pitfalls of living in a semi-populated area many times. I tell myself at least it's not as often as 10 years ago when I was making once-a-week trips to find cards. But speaking of that, I was there to get a couple household items, a combination of which you can only find there , or by ordering online and waiting two weeks for them to arrive in the mail. I naturally ambled over to the card kiosk section to take the edge off. It's really a candy-and-such kiosk but do I see any of that other stuff? No. It's funny how Walmart has suddenly become the place to go for cards now. Target has been a disaster since mid-2020. But Walmart, which had been a card desert for at least five years, has rebounded a bit. There, I found blasters of Allen & Ginter, Heritage, Stadium Club, Bowman Platinum and various Panini things that didn't register. I felt l...

    Andrew McCutchen found a new team yesterday. He's a Brewer, continuing his tour through every team in major league baseball apparently. Not only has McCutchen bounced from team to team the last five years but many others have as well. The transactions on the baseball wire the past week are arriving rapid-fire as teams are making up for lost time. Then there's that practice of rotating players in and out of the lineup, up and down from the minors, that has grown in frequency the last few years. Nobody stays in place much anymore and it's very tough as a fan to keep up. You need alerts on your phone to keep track and then you'd promptly turn notifications off because the incessant beeping would drive you batty.   Not only is it difficult to stay on top of who is on what team but you're now required to keep track of prospects, too. The attention given to prospects is off the charts compared with what it was when I first got into baseball. Prospects were guys you sa...

2020 Topps is scheduled to debut in two days and unless you're a Texas Rangers fan , you're probably at least a little bit excited for the new card season. I know I am. No matter how far Topps inches away from what I think baseball cards should be, no matter how much MLB inches away from what I think baseball should be, I'm still interested in what comes out of the first packs each year. I hope that never goes away. If it does, it means I will have morphed 100 percent into grumpy old man status, rather than the approximate 58 percent I am at right now, crabbing about Super Bowl halftime shows and the price of hot dogs. (Every person on Facebook sounded about 128 years old last night). However ... I'm not expecting much. I've already said I don't like the design for 2020 Topps. I'm already horrified as a team collector about the Rangers situation. And, I've already noted how many rookies are in Series 1. There are 47. That's 13 perc...

The new issue of Beckett Baseball Magazine is out. The folks at Beckett made the January issue all about the 1980s and the card craziness from that decade. The nostalgia for the '80s seems to be lasting longer than nostalgia for other decades. Nostalgia for a particular decade usually arrives 20 years after the decade in question and then fades after about a decade. But here we are, just about 30 years after the close of the '80s and '80s tributes are everywhere. Included in those continuing tributes are a couple of '80s baseball card countdowns. One is in the January edition of Beckett magazine -- the top 80 cards of the '80s. The other one will be on my blog -- hopefully starting in January -- and is called The 100 Greatest Cards of the '80s. There will be some similarities between these two lists, but there will be lots and lots of differences. I don't have a subscription to Beckett magazine (I probably should think about it if I just wrote an ...