Night Owl Cards

This was the scene outside in my backyard a couple of hours ago. It pretty much looks this way still, except the roads are plowed out a little, enough for me to get to work. We received more than two feet of snow in a 12-hour period overnight and this morning. It makes the thought of "maybe I'll head over to Target and see if there's any 2020 Heritage" a ridiculous one. Obviously I won't be doing that until Monday at the earliest. There's really not much to do around here when the weather is like this. Once shoveling and inside "responsibilities" are finished, I'm down to either playing with my cards or going online to see what other people are doing with cards. It's that second part that gets me in trouble -- or, more accurately, gets me irked. It's just a little thing really. But it's bothered me for years. It comes up quite frequently and I've heard it more often now that Heritage is out. Twice already, I...

Topps is never going to change. For as long as I have been collecting baseball cards, more than 40 years now, Topps has been creating alternate reality on its baseball cards. It has placed players into uniforms of teams for which they never played. It has moved an entire ball game scene from Boston to L.A. It has erased umpires and bat boys. It has pictured living players posing with dead players. And it hasn't just been Topps doing this. Fleer and Upper Deck and probably others each have their own very well-known examples. But this is a Topps card so I'm making it an example: what the heck are the Dodgers doing wearing red numbers on their uniform backs? This has been pointed out by at least a couple of other bloggers already, but I can't let it go as a Dodgers devotee. Red numbers have been a part of the Dodgers' uniform since 1952. They were created for TV. Owner Walter O'Malley liked the idea of bright numbers on the front that TV viewers could see....

Release date for 2020 Heritage is tomorrow. I always considered March as being "Heritage month" but apparently Topps has moved it up because nobody can buy packs of any new release for more than a couple weeks without being distracted anymore. My warning to anyone contemplating completing Heritage this year is the Felipe Lopez card right here. I bought this Lopez card, which arrived at my home yesterday, in my continuing attempt to get out from under that contract I signed with Topps 12 years ago to complete the 2008 Heritage set. It's one of the many blasted short-prints in the set and I've been buying like two a year for the last 10 years because I'm cheap and annoyed and indignant and all those things that Heritage has made me. Oh, and Lopez stopped playing in the majors nine years ago. So, bang-up job, night owl, on timely completion of that set. Because I still need seven more short-prints to finish the set. I've mentioned several times that my...

Someone posted a card on Twitter yesterday that I couldn't quite place for an instant. It was a card of a bunch of Expos posed together with the sun setting behind them and a wonderfully descriptive logo in the corner. And then I remembered: Ah, yes, its from my favorite Upper Deck set of all-time, the '93 set. There were all kinds of crazy, wild things going on inside the 1993 Upper Deck set -- INSIDE, the set, not outside , like today where interesting stuff is reserved for inserts and short-prints. Yes, '93 UD did have inserts, too, but the regular cards, the subset cards (remember those?) were so funky that you barely cared whether you saw the inserts. "Teammates/Team Stars" is one of the many subsets within '93 Upper Deck. The theme is simple: get some guys together from the same team for a photo and slap a goofy name and logo on the card to sum them up. Upper Deck did that for every team and made them as staged and dopey as possible. Bu...