Night Owl Cards

Welcome again, class. I think by now everyone knows your basic Dodger card. The deep blue caps and helmets. The crisp white uniforms with blue script writing. The hint of red on the torso numbers, but nowhere else . The bright white, interlocking "L" and "A". And the background, history, and everything else that emanates from that card. A Dodger card stands out, and there is no doubt that it belongs in the collection. But there are many other cards that are Dodger cards that get mucked up by something else on the card. I see some of you putting those cards in other categories. For example: This is a Dodger card. But this is a Dodger card, too. There is one player on here with no visible team logo. Doesn't matter. He makes it a Dodger card. Trout card? Stickers? Wrong and wrong. Dodger CARD. Three Hall of Famers and a Dodger. Dodger card. Oh, what's that tiny picture in the corner? Yup! Dodger card. I see no...

This post was basically written already by high-roller garveyceyrusselllopes , but I've already had the cards scanned for some time and the premise in my head for a few weeks, so there's no going back now. The brain wants what it wants. I received some Dodger cards from Max of The Starting Nine earlier this month and the star of the package -- no respect to Juan Uribe here -- was the legendary Sandy Koufax. He is all over Topps Heritage this year: Add those to the one Then & Now card I had already ... ... and then add a FIFTH Koufax Then & Now card that I don't own yet (it's another Koufax-Price combination), and that's a lot of Koufax. It's also a lot of collection-enhanced cardboard. Here's what I mean by that. You've all heard of "performance-enhancing drugs" -- those frowned-upon chemical aids that some players obtain in an effort to artificially inflate their stats, right? Well, I say these cards here...

I have a lot to cover today so I hope you've brought your attention span. I was out of town over the weekend, so I decided to update myself on this certain card shop in Buffalo that I had gone to several years ago. I'm always very busy when I'm in the city and intend to stop by, but never get a chance. Also, when the headquarters of Dave and Adam's Card World is in Buffalo, too, there isn't much time for other card shops. I had noticed several times while driving by that the shop had been renamed to place less emphasis on cards and more emphasis on comics. OK, no big deal. Yeah, it's a sign of the times, but I've seen comics and cards peacefully coexist in the past. But when I walked in, all I saw were comic books. Boxes and boxes and boxes of comic books, each box featuring rows and rows of comics. There were tables set up with boxes in the front room, and then in the back room, more tables, more boxes and more comics. On the displays on the walls,...

When the 1979 baseball cards hit store shelves, my hatred for the Yankees was as high as it had ever been and perhaps has been since. The previous season, the Yankees had rallied to surpass my second favorite team and my brother's favorite team, the Red Sox, to make the playoffs, then defeated another favorite, the Royals, for the third straight time to reach the World Series, then beat my favorite team for a second straight time, the Dodgers. Hated them. Bucky f-ing Dent, Reggie Jackson's hip, Graig Nettles' glove, the smug, self-satisfied classmates. All of them. That feeling lasts to this day. But that doesn't mean I can't enjoy Yankees cards. Growing up in the Northeast, in Yankee territory, there were just parts of my childhood that are stamped with Yankeeness. The instrumental theme song before every game. The 1978 Yankee yearbook acquired when I saw my first MLB game in person. And, of course, the Yankee Burger King cards. Ideally, I would ha...

Everyone knows this card, I presume. It's a famous card from a period when everyone collected cards. It's probably one of the best cards from the 1993 Topps set, and Topps thought enough of it that it made this card No. 200. But I have looked at Kirby and his oversized bat repeatedly over the years, and the first thing I think of is not "get a load of that bat" or "what a great card" or anything like that. The thing I think of is the thing I thought of the first time I pulled this card: "I know I've seen this picture before." It's actually a picture from a Sports Illustrated shoot -- the 1992 baseball preview edition, to be specific, and the cover photo, to be exact. My first thought when I noticed the similarity was "how could Topps do that?" I knew the power of Sports Illustrated and how their photos were the most familiar and interesting sports photos in the world. How could Topps just swipe a photo -- a cover pho...