Night Owl Cards

  Is this a new series? I think it might be. I was attempting to hunt down a new angle for the "Joy of a Team Set" series a week or two ago, but I'm starting to feel like I've run out of ideas for that series. I'm not going to end it, I may have just hit a temporary snag, but I thought I'd go in a slightly different direction. I've praised the common, ordinary subset many times on this blog and have devoted a full post to individual ones here and there. I've even written a magazine article focused on them. Subsets seem like a fad of the past, with inserts taking over in the mid-to-late '90s. But the subset still appears periodically. However, I don't count a group of cards as subsets if they are not numbered consecutively in a set. That's the first rule of defining a subset. (Topps, start grouping your league leader cards together again, please). Subsets have been part of main sets since the 1950s, probably longer. During the '50s and ...

I was going through the 1988 Topps set the other day in search of candidates for the Greatest 100 Cards of the '80s countdown and marveling over the pleasing nature of that set. I will go to my grave insisting that the '88 Topps set is one of the most overlooked, picture-perfect sets ever made and losing a tiny bit of respect for anyone who says it's "boring." I have harped on this over and over and ranked the '88 Topps set fairly high in my all-time Topps sets countdown. From the rookie cup cards to the manager cards to the -- good, lord those Mets cards -- and the terrific, colorful, 3-D nature of the set, it's one of my favorites. But there is one element of it that I've always overlooked like the masses overlook '88 Topps. The team leaders cards are an unnoticed treasure. Perhaps it's because they don't look like the rest of the cards in the set, with the lack of a colored border and the white fog enveloping one-fourth of ...

Someone posted a card on Twitter yesterday that I couldn't quite place for an instant. It was a card of a bunch of Expos posed together with the sun setting behind them and a wonderfully descriptive logo in the corner. And then I remembered: Ah, yes, its from my favorite Upper Deck set of all-time, the '93 set. There were all kinds of crazy, wild things going on inside the 1993 Upper Deck set -- INSIDE, the set, not outside , like today where interesting stuff is reserved for inserts and short-prints. Yes, '93 UD did have inserts, too, but the regular cards, the subset cards (remember those?) were so funky that you barely cared whether you saw the inserts. "Teammates/Team Stars" is one of the many subsets within '93 Upper Deck. The theme is simple: get some guys together from the same team for a photo and slap a goofy name and logo on the card to sum them up. Upper Deck did that for every team and made them as staged and dopey as possible. Bu...