Night Owl Cards

So, team collectors, how ya doing with completing that Heritage team set from last year? Yeah, yeah, I know, you bought the entire team set last March. Probably a smart system when it comes to Heritage. The checklist for 2019 Heritage was released the other day and before I do anything else, I head right for the short-prints portion of the list. I want to know what kind of aggravation I am facing right up front. It turns out I'm facing significant unpleasantness. The Dodgers feature a whopping six short-prints in this year's Heritage set. That is one year after the Heritage broke the old record for the most Dodger SPs with five (the Adrian Gonzalez card up top included). So, Heritage has set yet another record, and Heritage is just getting meaner and meaner and more and more difficult to collect. Consider the various short-print related "innovations" in Heritage when it comes to collecting the Dodgers. In 2013, Heritage twisted the knife on every team co...

This year's Topps' Archives set has started showing up on store shelves here and there (well, not here ) and there have been a few posts about it. Overall, those who have posted seem to have good feelings about the product, which is great for them. I'm glad someone is enjoying it. But I'm even more irritated over Archives than I usually am, which I'll get to in a moment. As I've said numerous times (I think if I ever shut down this blog it will be because all I'm doing is repeating myself every post), Archives is a disappointment because of what it could have been. Archives is a descendent of the Archives sets from 2001-02 but more resemble the Fan Favorites sets from 2003-05. The problem there is I can't help but compare present-day Archives and Fan Favorites from a decade ago. Fan Favorites comes out on top every time. Fan Favorites featured multiple designs (not just three) appeared on sturdy cardboard stock (not the flimsy stuff Archives s...

The checklist for 2015 Topps Heritage came out yesterday and, like always, I search out the Dodgers as well as which ones are short prints. I'm not too enthused about Heritage this year because the 1966 design is another one of the '60s borefests. The yellow-on-red used with the Dodgers (and the Yankees) makes it seem more of a food-issue card than a Topps card ... hey, wait ... maybe the design isn't so bad after all. But I'm also not looking forward to chasing another round of Dodgers short prints. For the fourth straight year, the Dodgers have three or more SPs in Heritage. This year, it's four. I went through the checklist and counted up the SP totals for each team. Here is what I found: American League Baltimore Orioles - 1; Boston Red Sox - 4; Chicago White Sox - 3; Cleveland Indians - 3; Detroit Tigers - 6; Houston Astros - 2; Kansas City Royals - 4; Los Angeles Angels - 4; Oakland A's - 1; Seattle Mariners - 5; Tampa Bay Rays - 1; Texas Ran...

This is another one of those posts that is probably only of interest to me. And I don't have the time to do any real research that would make it interesting to others. Such is life. This blog really is about me, isn't it? Anyway, a week or two ago, Chris from View From The Skybox asked me a question that made me think something that I think all the time: "where do they come up with this stuff?" He wanted to know if cards 1-132 in the 1975 Topps mini set were more difficult to find than the other cards in the set. I told him "no," because they haven't been. But I have heard in the past that even though the 1975 Topps set was issued all at once and not series by series, cards 1-132 were printed in smaller quantities and considered short-prints. But I always looked at that statement quizzically. Because when I was collecting in 1975, that wasn't the case at all. I have excellent recollection of my first year of collecting cards and if I suspe...