Night Owl Cards

  Last week I bought a blaster of 2024 Topps with the cash that I didn't spend at the card show that I went to at the start of the month.  That doesn't sound like the smartest of moves -- save that cash for something vintage you want! -- but I've been living my card-purchasing life online for the last month-plus and it's getting tired. I needed to buy in person.   I had planned to add some Heritage but it wasn't there. I could have missed it because there were two guys dominating the space talking about their next Magic thingy and I had to squeeze past them. But I was happy with the '24 Topps.     Some of the highlights, there were others that I needed, too. There were also many, many dupes, so I won't be getting any more retail. It's all about Heritage now anyway. (If I was MLB commish, I would reinstate real extra innings first and ban public displays of unnecessary ballplayer yelling next). I did pull my first autograph of the year. This was appropria...

  In my current state of gathering 1988 Donruss (down to one card as of today!), I was reminded of a border feature from the mid-'80s to early '90s on those Donruss sets. The border patterns lined up if you positioned the cards just so. So I did it, just to finally see what junk wax fans were talking about and ... yeah, to get an easy blog post. The first four Donruss sets all featured white borders, but in 1985 it started go with colored borders and it also started doodling inside the borders. I was not a fan of Donruss doodling, as I've said many times most of those '80s Donruss sets just don't look that professional to me, compared with their counterparts at the time. But I'm not above collecting them or lining them up. The 1985 set featured black borders and red racing stripes that you could line up with any other card. Then in 1986, Donruss decided to just put lines all over the entire card. It's pretty easy to line these up with approximately 100 lines...

My favorite thing to do right now is discover music that is new to me. Last night, I came across the Steely Dan song "Showbiz Kids" for the first time in my life. This is a bit embarrassing to admit because I grew up listening to Steely Dan on the radio. I know all of their hits. I know some of their less-familiar songs. I have the track list of "Aja" memorized. But I'm not a Steely Dan super-fan, which means I don't own many of their albums and also that allows me to make cool discoveries like " Showbiz Kids " nearly 50 years after it came out. Discoveries among the old and familiar are the best. That goes for cards, too. Sometimes. I have known that there are "variations" for 1991 Donruss cards for quite awhile, probably even before I started reading card blogs and getting involved in the online hobby community. I was always able to ignore these "differences." It seemed a bit ridiculous to be chasing differ...

After basically taking the year off from collecting in 1990, I was back in 1991. I collected a lot of stuff in 1991 -- because there was a lot to collect. They blew the barn doors off in 1991. Cards and collecting and hobby people in general would never be the same because of '91. There was no going back. The genie was out of the bottle. Everyone had an accountant. We were all going to be stinkin' rich. And the quickest way to retirement -- in 1991 -- was to buy even more cards. The card companies were there for you. There were no less than nine major card sets in 1991, the most ever. I'm not even counting things like Classic and O-Pee-Chee Premiere. Nine sets to collect. NINE! For the first six years of my collecting existence I was collecting one solitary set and sticking my fist in a cereal box for another. That was it. NINE! The '91 card season is probably most notable for the growth in "premium" sets. Leaf in 1990 spawned Stadium Club and Ult...

I really don't want to start another series on this blog. But at the same time I am addicted to countdown shows. I am also addicted to "worst lists" just because "best lists" are so played out. So why not do a list of the "best worst" just to mix things up a little bit? Yeah, and why not find 100 of them? And then why not do a countdown show with that list of the very best worst 100 cards in my collection? Sure, why not? So that's what I'm going to do. Coming soon: the 100 best worst cards in my collection. And not those usual cards that you've seen 1,000 times over and over again. First, that's boring. Second, I probably don't have those cards. So stay tuned ... For whenever I get around to it. You can bet this 1991 Donruss Sandy Alomar Award Winner card will be somewhere on there. It's tremendously awful.

I'm told that today is baseball card artist and illustrator Dick Perez's birthday. My brief research was only able to turn up a birth year on Perez, not a date. But this guy seems to know, and he's a big Diamond Kings fan, so he probably knows more than I. I'm already on the record as not being a Diamond Kings fan. There are a few reasons for this. The first is, while Diamond Kings are huge favorites among those collectors who were young kids when Donruss first started producing Diamond Kings, I was a junior in high school when they first showed up. And you know how 16-year-old boys like to tear things apart. The world isn't "oh, wow, COOL!" anymore. It's more like "what the f&%# is THIS?" The second is, I will always be a "photography over illustration" guy. It's not that I don't like drawing. I LOVE drawing. I've done it a lot and am a semi-adequate sketcher. (But I've written about that already ). I ...