Night Owl Cards

  March is dead again, you guys. Oh sure, it will come back to life, but today is a day to celebrate!   I often celebrate my least favorite month's demise with some sort of card order. A COMC or sportlots arrival or something like it. In fact I am welcoming various cards from a sportlots order right now, but they're not all here yet.   I can, however, take one of the cards that showed up and celebrate the completion of set -- because on the very day March took its last breath, I completed 1983 Donruss.     This Ron Jackson card was the last one I needed to finish the set. Jackson comes in three varieties. There's another one with a green border (which all of his Angels teammates have) and another one that reads "A's" in the glove instead of "Angels". I'd like the green border one someday but that's not important right now. What's important is THE SET IS COMPLETE!   Finishing the 1983 Donruss set was key because it's one of the last ma...

  Greetings, my lovely readers.   There is one thing I love to do most when collecting cards. I think you know what that is.   I love to complete sets.   It's not easy to do and it's getting more difficult. But that's OK, I've completed plenty in my time. Even if I never completed another, I'd always have the dozens and dozens perfectly finished sets to view at my leisure.   Still, I press on.   Just yesterday I completed one. It was pretty easy. I finished 1989 Score.   It took not even a couple of months once I received a pile of them from Bru . And then the final handful showed up this week.    First, these three cards from Detroit Tigers Cards and Stuff . Ol' Boobie Maine happened to open a box of '89 Score at the same time I was trying to complete it! I guess that's not all that coincidental. Even 37 years later there's probably someone opening a box of the stuff almost every day.   The Brian Harper was the gremlin in the set that s...

  I did one of these last year, on the exact same date, in fact. It's a nice numbers-driven look at the performance of the blog in the past year. It was inspired by Diamond Jesters, who evaluated his blog in the same way last year.   I know I just did a year-end review a week ago, but that was a lot of words and this involves waaaaaaaay less picture-taking. I need more breathers these days.   So let's look at the numbers:   Blog overview: I am in my 18th year of running this blog. I also run the 1993 Upper Deck blog (very casually, if I may add). This is my 5,876th post on NOC. If I continue to write even an average number of posts I will hit post 6,000 this year.   Team-set goals: I continue to collect the Dodgers base sets for the major sets that come out. I'm less enthusiastic about stuff like Chrome but I will eventually get those team sets done, too. As for inserts and parallels and online issues, I only add what appeals to me, and I'm doing it less and le...

  Take a look at this 1977 Topps Bobby Murcer card. Notice anything different?   Sure you do. The card face is cloth, not cardboard.   This fascinated me as a young collector. I was around 12 or 13 when I saw 1977 Topps cloth stickers advertised, probably in our subscription to Baseball Digest magazine. I couldn't conceive of how they could make a card sticker out of cloth. The fact that they were the same size as a regular Topps card and showed the same photos (in most cases) as the regular set made me want them even more.   But I never ordered them, didn't have the money at the time and then later when I got back into chasing cards from my youth, the set was just a little bit cost prohibitive for me. Still, I put them on the "someday" list where they waited for years upon years.   Fast forward to Christmas week 2025. For someone who didn't receive any cards as presents this year, it's been a productive holiday as far as the hobby. The day after Christmas I p...

   Don't worry, not more on the 2025 Series, at least not now.   Today I "finished" the 1971 Fleer World Series set, what I like to call the "Fleer Laughlin World Series set" as it was illustrated by artist Robert Laughlin and he was the inspiration for the sets, which he kicked off in 1967, creating and issuing the sets out of his own home.   The 1935 World Series card was the last card that I needed, kind of a surprise that it was the final one to arrive at my door.      The 1956 card was the second-to-last arrival, more in line with my expectations.     I figured either the 1956 or 1919 or 1969 card would be the last one I needed. They were all among the final six or seven but nothing proved very difficult to find, which I appreciate, though part of me is a little miffed that these aren't adored by other collectors like they are by me. Still I should be careful what I wish for (see: my increasing difficulty in obtaining '70s Kellogg's and ...

  Yesterday I completed the 1969 Topps set. While home for dinner, I opened a couple of card orders and the last one contained card No. 500, Mickey Mantle.   It's the yellow-name variety, it's the last Mantle card issued during his career, and all that stuff. Most importantly for me, it's the final card.   I thought it would take me longer to get this card and finish the set. Once I had acquired the Nolan Ryan in September (and the Phil Regan, don't forget him!), I started looking at Mantle prices. I didn't like what I saw. But I didn't do a thorough search, so I figured there was something a bit more reasonable out there for when the time came.    Well, the time came a couple of weeks ago. Out of the blue, I received a reimbursement check from my health insurance that I wasn't expecting, and I immediately knew where some of that was going to go. I started searching again and it became apparent that I was going to have to spend $200 to get anything that was...

  For the first five years of this blog, there was nothing more mind-blowing to me than communicating and trading with collectors from around the world, specifically overseas.   England, France, Australia, Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, I couldn't believe the reach of the blog and how many different people collected baseball cards! I connected with many of them and traded multiple times with some.   Then, slowly, each of them disappeared from the blog space, often without a trace, until it's now just me and some of my Canadian friends.   One collector, though, has turned back the clock, at least for now, by moving from the States back to Japan. Kenny, a.k.a., Zippy Zappy , has been downsizing and refocusing his collection and sending out cards to folks who could use them more than he can.   I received an envelope from Japan a few weeks ago with some cards, and then yesterday a big, fat package from Japan Post was deposited on a chair on my porch. Well, well, t...

  Here in the Northeast, August is still summer vacation. Hearing about people going back to school this week in the south or out west is disturbing and I'm grateful I have only known stepping into a classroom for the first time during September.   However, August is nothing great here either. I've written many times about "August dread" -- I've experienced it since I was a little kid. And with my job for the last 30-plus years, August remains the calm before the storm -- a month's worth of trying to squeeze in every bit of fun you can before the education system saps your will to live.   Also, August, for this house, is a month of less money (the education system pays the bills). I don't cut out card spending completely as I did during past Augusts, but I still need to watch the budget. I balance the lack of funds with the need for cards to dull the August edge -- card by card. Singles are the way to go this month, rather than boxes or packs.   So here ar...