Night Owl Cards

I still plan to post my annual review of the past year in baseball cards but I needed a bit of a breather after yesterday's decade review. Both posts take quite a bit of research. Besides, I wanted to try Diamond Jesters' blog-bat around idea of filling a "yearbook page" of 2019 cards before the year was out. Matt's yearbook idea contains all kinds of rules and I admit they nearly killed the whole idea for me. But more on that later. The Yearbook Page is supposed to summarize 2019 in baseball cards. The first pocket (upper left) is to contain a Topps flagship card from 2019. The next five pockets (2 through 6) can contain a card from any of the other Topps brands. The seventh and eighth pockets should contain a 2019 insert, and the ninth pocket is a wild card, which is a card of your choice. Matt adds a couple of other restrictions involving not repeating designs (no Chrome or Opening Day) and not filling the page with just cards of your favorite team....

Happy New Year! Mr. Sandberg is dressed for the big event, even if he is a bit confused about what year it is. I'm looking forward to 2009. But before I ring in the new, I must ring out the old. So here is a list of a 100 things I've learned in 2008, as they relate to this collecting hobby of ours. Some of these "things" are fact, some are opinions, some are just plain nonsense. And I fudged a little bit here and there to get to 100. And I'm counting backward, like Casey Kasem. Here's what I've learned: 100. Blasters are my friend. 99. My friend keeps reminding me of how stupid I am for picking him (her?) as a friend. 98. People exist who love 1991 Fleer and 1988 Donruss. And that's helped me enjoy them, too. 97. Short-printing, and any other tactic that produces artificial scarcity, is the ruin of this hobby. If any one factor is powerful enough to destroy this hobby, this is it. 96. Giants fans make for good trading partners. Who knew? 95. To...