Night Owl Cards

I woke up late Saturday morning to discover that Topps had joined the usual suspects in spamming my inbox. There, among the advertisements for walk-in tubs, weight-loss supplements and teeth-whiteners that had escaped the spam filter, was a breathless Topps message stating that cards were available of Vlad Guerrero Jr. only for the next 24 hours! I had somehow managed to avoid most Topps Now advertising so I don't know why suddenly I was receiving these emails. Another one arrived earlier today. There were only 3 hours left! At the exact moment that the second email arrived, I was online checking out the prices on my needs for the 1976 Kellogg's 3-D set. I can't think of two kinds of cards that are farther apart on the card spectrum. An underpriced oddball from the '70s that you could find in your cereal box or an overpriced slicked-up online exclusive, get it now or it's GONE FOREVER (not really) . Topps had become as useless to me as the spam...

Every self-help outlet churns out the same list of mood lifters to their perpetually down-in-the-dumps readers. It often goes something like this: Exercise Sleep Get outdoors, particularly in the sun Talk to a friend Eat healthy foods There is a whole sub-category of mood lifters such as music, movies, pets, shopping and travel, too. But not once do I see anything in any self-help list that mentions baseball cards. Baseball cards have boosted my mood more times than I can count. I'm currently in need of a mood-boost given my family situation and work situation (co-worker is on vacation, meaning I'm working six straight days). I've tried posting every single day this week in hopes of writing myself out of my mood. It hasn't quite worked, so I thought I'd go for the big guns: a selection of cards sent by Nick of Dime Boxes . Anyone with that many flea markets and card shows at his disposal should do a fine job of lifting a fellow card-collector'...

(I am posting this during the time of the NFL Draft, which probably isn't a wise programming move. Even though we will play up this event in the newspaper, I still can't figure out why people get so excited about the draft. It is bizarre that fans set aside time to watch people sit around and make picks. But then second-guessing has become a full-time online industry so I suppose it makes sense. This is Cardboard Appreciation and this is the 281st in a series): I'm sure many of you have seen the Yahoo series "Old Baseball Cards," hosted by Mike Oz, on youtube or maybe on the Yahoo Sports site. It's an interesting few minutes of Oz and a notable baseball player or manager opening packs of baseball cards from the '80s or '90s and then they trade some cards. You aren't going to learn a lot about cards -- I sometimes get annoyed by how little the player and Oz know about the packs and the cards they're opening, but then they don't run a ...

That would be 2018. It's been coming for awhile. Probably around 2015 or so I began to think "I can't do this anymore. I just can't keep up." Even though from the beginning I always knew that there would be no way I could collect every Dodger card as a team collector, I still had hope for several years. There weren't that many parallels or that many inserts. Sure, there were a bunch of 1 of 1 cards, but I could ignore those easily enough. Then it became a deluge. More and more parallels. More and more inserts. More and more variations. Cards from Panini that I didn't even like and parallels and variations of those . Then the online exclusives came. More and more online exclusives. Topps Now and the Living Set and current players on retro designs that were issued like every week and that weren't available at the store down the street. Then came the club-membership-type deals from Topps where you could sign up and Topps would make cards made exc...

I'm sure many fans are happy to see more players being selected to the Hall of Fame the last few of years. I am, too, if only to quiet the whining about it, somewhat. But one area where "more Hall of Famers per year" complicates things is in my exercise to find out which Topps flagship set features the most Hall of Famers. The 2019 class is six people large, just like last year and just like 2014. That's a lot of additions to the sets for which I've already totaled the number of Hall of Famers. Throw in the new sets that I add every time I do this and this becomes a multiple-hour project. But it's worth it, right? Sure. Meanwhile, I continue to discover errors in past Most Hall of Famers posts. I found a big one recently. I listed Pete Rose as being a Hall of Famer in the 1972 Topps set. Astonishingly, no one called me on that. Once I removed Rose, the '72 set then dropped out of a first-place tie with the 1969 and 1983 Topps sets for the mo...