Night Owl Cards

I received two more Jackie Robinson Story cards from Paul's Random Stuff yesterday. This means I have four of the 10 cards in the set, which is pretty good for me. It's a nice little set, although the Robinson retrospective has been done several times in cards already and some of the photos (staring directly at the card on the left) have been used as often as I go through post-it notes. But it's well-designed and the cards like the one on the right make up for that. This is the Target-exclusive set this year. Walmarts feature the Babe Ruth Story. I happened to pull one of those cards the other day and it's still freaking me out. Please don't turn out the lights when this card is in the room. I'm sure something in the head region will start glowing. The fact that these are the respective Target and Walmart exclusives means the red and blue parallels that were the respective stores' exclusives for the last few years are no more. And there doesn...

I don't know about you, but for me No vember has been a weird month, both on the blog and elsewhere. For one, readership always goes down in November. Always. It's been that way since I first figured out you could calculate such things. I don't know why that is. The weather is almost always crap in November, you'd think people would focus on more sedentary activities. Second, a lot of people either stop talking about or paying attention to baseball cards in November, which might be the answer to the paragraph above. I'm a baseball guy, so I'll never stop talking about baseball cards just because the season's over. But I guess some people do. Third, I'm broke in November. Well, I'm broke a lot of other months out of the year these days, but no money in November has been a constant for the last six years. Finally, it gets odd for people in November. I don't know if people sense they're getting to the end of the year and they assess t...

I'm a team collector. And that means I do things like this to myself. I put cards like this in my binders, which are supposed to be devoted to Dodgers and nothing else. I reconcile the sight of Tigers and Braves and Cardinals appearing in my binder by blaming the card companies for their diabolical schemes in which they put players from opposing teams on the SAME CARD. It places the guilt on their shoulders and absolves me of my own guilt for having non-Dodgers enclosed in a binder of such honor. But team collectors know this scenario well, and both I and they have written many posts about this particular predicament. And that's why, in a matter of days, I received the above card from Max of Starting Nine , as well as this card ... ... and then these two cards from Paul of Paul's Random Stuff ...    I'm telling you, Bazooka was evil. But both Max and Paul know that being the completist that I am, I'm required to have these cards. Even if a Dodge...

I received a healthy stack of Orel Hershiser cards from Paul's Random Stuff recently. All of the cards were from one of those Star sets of the late '80s/early '90s. I know nothing about these things except what I've barely absorbed reading blogs. Near as I can tell, some company called itself "Star" and decided to produce some cards out of someone's basement. The set features select stars of the day. Each star has about 10 cards in the set. A different photo of that player appears on each card. If that's not confusing enough, there are gold and platinum versions of these cards. And there are promo cards, and rookie series, and the more I read through my Standard Catalog of Baseball Cards, the more perplexed I got (the opposite is supposed to happen). So I thought I'd just stop talking about something I don't know and show the cards. Gold: Some of the photos, I guess, aren't too bad. I sort of like this one: And here's the...

As I continue to address the packages that require the least amount of posting effort, I direct your attention to this Pee Wee Reese Kimball mini. It fell out of an envelope sent to me by Paul of Random Baseball Stuff fame. "Aww, that's nice," I said to no one in attendance. "But I have this card already." But a couple of seconds later, I remembered that I had seen something on the baseballcardpedia.com  site. I had scrolled through the checklist on the site for Topps Series 2's Kimball minis and noticed that there was a Pee Wee Reese listed for Series 2. "That's odd," I said to no one in attendance again. "Pee Wee had a Kimball mini in Series 1." I kind of chalked it up to wiki-error, which I really shouldn't do, because in this case, baseballcardpedia is an invaluable service that fills the egregious, inconceivable wrong perpetrated by Topps' refusal to provide an online checklist. But remembering the checklist...

Yup. There's nothing that goes better than your favorite team sinking to the basement and a trade post. The shame. The loyalty. You're ashamed to root for such an inept team yet too loyal to become a bandwagon fan. You're ashamed of dumping another trade post on your readers yet too loyal to your traders, knowing it's the right thing to do. They go hand in hand! I only wish that the Dodgers were alone in last place (instead of sharing it with a team whose true destiny is the bottom). I wish they held the worst record in baseball so they would get a chance at drafting a hot shot phenom with behavioral and entitlement problems who will never be happy in his life until he realizes that his attitude sucks. Bring on MLB draft 2012! (*sarcasm disclaimer here*) But first: Shame and Loyalty. I'll start slowly with the rest of the cards I received from GCA . This is a 2005 Bowman gold card of former Dodgers Double A stud Heath Totten. He hasn't pitched profes...