Night Owl Cards

This card has sat on my Nebulous 9 list for far too long. It was easily the most available card on that list for a long period of time and for months and months and months it was the last card I needed to complete the 2017 World Series subset from 2018 Heritage. I finally received the card from Henry at Cardboard Greats . He's the one guy with the guts to send me this card, apparently. I actually don't know why the other cards from this subset arrived so readily (some I pulled, some came via card packages) but this one did not. The only thing I have to go on is it shows the one Astro to do the most damage to the Dodgers in that World Series, hitting a game-winning home run in extra innings of a game that the Dodgers could easily have one. But that was nothing exceptional in that series. It was a crazy back-and-forth series, full of tension, excitement and crushing lows. And this wasn't even the one late-night, walk-off Astros victory, it happened again in that biza...

There are no card pictures with this post because I did not get any cards today. It's release day for 2019 Topps flagship, a notable day on the calendar for any collector, no matter how cynical. If you're going to get any cards, this is the day to do it -- at least that's what some people say. "Release day" around here doesn't mean the same thing it does in a great big city like Topps' hometown of NYC. The chances of flagship showing up at the few choice stores around here on the first day of release are less than 50 percent. Sometimes it happens, sometimes it doesn't. However, I don't know whether my stores have the cards or not. I didn't bother to check. The main reason? There was a blizzard warning. There is no way I'm traveling a few miles down the road, even if it is the most traveled road in the county, to get to a Target or Walmart to look for cards in the middle of a blizzard. So far, I haven't seen any blizzard. But...

This card appeared in my most recent 1985 Topps blog post. It's Joe Orsulak's rookie card. It is now missing. I don't know what the heck I did with it but I can't find it anywhere. And now there's a temporary hole in my complete 1985 Topps AND Traded set (there are only a dozen sets in my collection that can claim the "AND Traded" part). Fortunately I am pretty busy these next few days because I need to keep busy or that little bit of sadness from losing this card will well up inside me and ... well, seeing a veteran card collector cry in the corner is never pretty. The Orsulak card could be anywhere. I did a lot of card things yesterday, immediately after posting the Orsulak card. He could be in the middle of any number of stacks. There is a stack in front of my desk computer of cards to be cataloged. I most often put the latest '85 Topps card to be blogged on top of that stack. But, maybe it's somewhere in the middle of the stack. I ...

It's one of the pure joys of being a set collector. Sometimes -- and it doesn't happen often -- someone will send you a whole bunch of cards that are all from a set you are building. Then you spend the entire day surrounded by cards from that set. Every card with the same theme. It's glorious. Set-collecting goes back longer than player-collecting so the chances are greater of inheriting a whole bunch of set needs all at once. People back in the day always grouped their cards in sets so there are just stashes of sets lying around. All you have to do is say you're collecting 1990 Donruss and there will be a line of people, toting boxes emanating a strange red light, at your door. This probably won't be the case years from now as player collectors have taken a greater piece of the pie. In the future, collectors will be desperate to off-load their several thousand Albert Pujols cards on someone, and we'll be avoiding them like they said, "Hey I have s...

To have an inexplicable attachment to a baseball card seems like such a part of childhood. It's not adult behavior. We adults know exactly why we like a card or a player. We can recite the reasons for anyone who asks: I like how he plays the game. He's on my favorite team. He plays my favorite position. He signed an autograph for me. He doesn't beat his wife or take drugs. He ascribes to my political affiliations/beliefs (this is a new development that is weird to me). Back when I was a kid I'd like a card for absolutely no reason, or at least not a reason that I can grasp as an adult. I would have no idea who the player was. That player could play for any team. The player could be shown in action or merely staring into space. Who knows why I liked that card! If only I could get into 9-year-old night owl's brain. But I'm long past being 9 years old. And still there is this card here to which I have an inexplicable attachment, that I like for absolutely ...

As I continue to assess what I really enjoy collecting, I find myself in a sort of collecting limbo. I'll go back to my traditional collecting desires, my many Dodgers cards and Dodgers binders, and that feels quite comfortable to me still. And then I'll dive into some of my more recent interests -- the '70s NFL cards and the Sabres cards and the music cards -- and those seem wonderful in a much more unfamiliar but exciting way. I'm a little out of my comfort zone when it's not all baseball, all-Dodger baseball all the time. I'm not nearly the expert that I am in the baseball arena. But that's OK. The hobby is anything I want it to be. I can test the limits of my comfort if I want. And that's exactly what I did recently, although it wasn't my choice at the beginning. But first, let's see some cards that I am completely comfortable with because I have been collecting them for the life of this blog and earlier: These, and the ...