Night Owl Cards

  I resolved to do this post about a month ago when Dime Boxes listed some of what he considers the worst of the junk wax era. I ranked my least favorite from this time way back in the blog's early days, so this time I wanted to list what my favorites from 1987-93 are. You probably already know most of them -- I'm not exactly quiet on my card favorites -- but this post is also to counter all the praise for traditional favorites like 1987 Topps and 1989 Upper Deck. I can be contrarian and those two sets were never my favorites when I was buying packs during that time. (Didn't even see '89 UD).   So I'm listing seven of my faves for posterity. Why seven? Because I consider the junk wax era to have lasted seven years, 1987-93. I can't comfortably squeeze 1986 and 1994 into that span, based on my experience of that time. Here is a very quick run through. 1. 1993 Upper Deck: You should know this by now. I'm writing a blog about it and everything . I don't kn...

I've been in a bit of a 1990 state of mind lately, which isn't the greatest place to reside if you're talking cards. It's possibly the pit of all baseball card years. But I recently completed the 1990 Topps set and that's allowed me to see that set and the year in cards in a somewhat new light. I certainly won't claim it was one of the greatest years to collect, but I do have enough strength, finally, to determine the best set issued those 12 months. In 1990, a new decade mind you, the number of card sets grew at an even greater rate than the pace of the late 1980s. We were now up to seven major sets, and a host of other minor sets, such as Classic and Sportflics. For the sake of brevity -- and my sanity -- I'm keeping this post to just the seven major sets. It's still two more than I've covered in any previous edition of this series. And it will keep me in good practice for the 1990s insanity yet to come. Because the number of sets to cov...

I don't have much to say after yesterday's Archives diatribe, so let's play a game of "Better Going Than Coming". This is a game I play sometimes with my Upper Deck cards. Only Upper Deck cards will do, and the earlier the Upper Deck brand, the better. As you know, Upper Deck burst upon the scene with several innovations, but the most notable one for me was the fact that there was a large color photo on both the front and the back of the card. Wow. Periodically, I'd look at the photo used on the back of the card -- which was smaller, because UD had to squeeze in those infernal stats onto the back, too -- and wonder why the back photo wasn't the one on the front of the card. The card looked better going than coming! (By the way, the back of the Trammell card isn't much better than the front, and '89 Upper Deck had photos that are as dark as anything Donruss put out -- I never could figure out why nobody ever mentioned that). So let'...

(There is nothing that will make me happier to see an NFL season end than the Giants winning the Super Bowl. I've suffered through this fate four times now, and it doesn't get any easier. Bring on the pitchers and catchers! Time for Cardboard Appreciation. This is the 133rd in a series): Upper Deck is known for making some vaguely snarky cards on the sly during their early days. The book "Card Sharks" documents some of it. I haven't read the book so I don't know if this Bill Buckner card is mentioned. But Upper Deck seems to be making a rather obvious comment on this card that came out four years after Buckner famously let a ground ball go through his legs in Game 6 of the 1986 World Series. Was Upper Deck yucking it up because they found a photo featuring a giant black hole between Buckner's legs? If so, UD had a lot of company. Buckner jokes filled the airwaves back then. He was the subject of late-night jokes and the target of hecklers in the...

So what the hell is wrong with me? I start a post about the worst year of the junk wax era by displaying perhaps the era's finest moment in 1991 Stadium Club? That was kind of the same thought process I went through when Chris Olds, of Beckett fame, tweeted today that 1991 ranked among the worst baseball card years of all-time. To his credit, he did mention the exception of Stadium Club debuting that year. But I thought that SC would be enough to push 1991 ahead of other ungodly baseball card years, like, say, 1990. Olds dismissed my suggestion of 1990 being worse than 1991 by mentioning the number of star rookies to come out of 1990. Ah, rookies. Rookies never crossed my mind when I compared the two years. I've found that this rookie deal is a generational thing. When many collectors under the age of about 35 grade the quality of certain baseball card years, one of the main criteria is "who were the rookies that year?" But I'm over 40. I don't give...

Since people seemed to enjoy Part 2 of my scattershot review  of horizontal cards, I figured I'd extend the horizontal theme into the awesome night card feature. One of these days, I'm going to pick a type of card, use it as a theme and then do nothing but those kinds of cards for an entire week. You know, an entire week of foil cards, or catcher's mask cards, or cards of players in unintentionally embarrassing poses. But there is nothing unsavory about this card. It is one of those multiple-exposure photos that Upper Deck liked so much in its early days. The photo is a nice look at how Wade Boggs approached an at-bat. He used the entire field, and it's obvious he's sending the ball the other way. Some people's complaint with horizontal cards is they have to tilt their head, or their binder, or the card, to look at it. That doesn't bother me. What does irritate me is that Upper Deck is trying to have it both ways on this card. The photo is horizontal,...

Until I started this blog, I never won anything. I know a lot of people say this, but it's true for me, too. Door prizes, radio contests, church raffles, fantasy baseball, race you to the corner. Nothing. This used to bother me. It bothered me so much that when I won third place in the seventh grade science fair, I hung onto that ribbon like it was a Nobel Prize. I was proud of that ribbon. It was well-earned, and at least I didn't debase myself and go the "exploding volcano" route, which has been and ever will be the biggest lowest common denominator gimmick in the history of science fairs. But then something happened: I started blogging about cards and I started winning contests. I don't know how many I've won exactly. Somewhere between 6 and 10, I think. And some I didn't have to do anything to win, so the feeling of accomplishment is non-existent. But I've also won a couple things at card shows, and after all those years of watching the volcano wi...