Night Owl Cards

By 1993, even dumb ol' me was waking up to the idea that the old collecting model wasn't going to work anymore. I couldn't possibly collect everything that was on store shelves at this rate. The objective every year since I started in 1975 -- find wax packs at stores, buy them -- was a solid purchasing model for years and years. But by the late 1980s, I couldn't keep up with all the sets out there and a lot of times I didn't care, and even in the years when I did try to buy them all, say 1991 and 1992, I was reaching the realization that this was stupid. So, in '93, I went into the collecting season with my eyes wide open. I would collect only what I knew or what appealed to me. And this is how the year went: Find Topps, buy Topps. Find Fleer, buy a little bit but I didn't really like it. Find Donruss, buy a little bit but I didn't really like that either. Find Score -- but it wasn't easy -- and buy it. Find Upper Deck and ... Holy smoke...

This is one of those "good news for me, bad news for Topps" posts. I've been on vacation this week. It's not great timing, given that I can barely go anywhere or do anything, but it was planned out long ago and a vacation is a vacation, I'm certainly not giving it back. It's given me time to do lots of card stuff, more than I would normally do on a vacation. And it's given me time to observe what kind of card stuff I'm doing, specifically what kind of card stuff I'm buying. And this is me observing: I ain't buying modern card stuff. This is a by-product of not going down to Target or Walmart or Walgreen's and buying what's in the card aisle. Since it's far too much hassle to do that, I have a little extra card money to burn, and instead of blowing it on Opening Day or Gypsy Queen, it's going toward cards purchased online. And what cards would those be? Well, it's not 2020 Topps. It's certainly not 2020 Panin...

It's 2020. You know what that means: According to the 20-year nostalgia cycle , we're about to be inundated with cultural references from 2000-09. Are you ready? Constant references to Monsters, Inc. and Endless Superhero Sequels? Odes to Nickelback and the Black-Eyed Peas? Paying homage to American Idol and High School Musical? Yuuuuuck. For me, 2000-09 is all about my daughter and whatever she was interested in: so kids movies from that time and Sponge Bob. All of the other stuff from that decade seems way too recent -- or way too crappy -- to be looking back on fondly. But I'm going to steer it quickly to the '80s and to cards. One of the many '80s tributes to the '60s was the movie "Good Morning Vietnam," starring Robin Williams. Movies like this helped introduce me to '60s music beyond the Beatles, Stones, Motown and Woodstock. The '60s has always been a great unknown for me, in terms of music and baseball and baseball cards. ...