Night Owl Cards

    I finished a week-long binge session of "The Queen's Gambit" Thanksgiving night.   Unlike many of my wife's Netflix interests, things like "The Crown" and various family comedy/dramas, I knew I'd be interested in "Gambit" while she was watching it. I'm a sucker for the "intelligent, pretty girl breaks up the boys club" story, and the fact that it featured chess was intriguing.   I haven't played chess since I was a teenager, but I used to play it regularly, not that I was any good. My uncle was. He would play in various local tournaments and come back with stories about the weird habits and tactics of his chess rivals. The gist of his stories was "this is something you don't want to do." But it sure sounded interesting. As Anya Taylor-Joy says, the mini-series isn't really about chess. The character she plays, Beth Harmon, has a lot of problems, a terrible family back story and substance abuse issues. She...

  The last couple of days, I've been gathering envelopes from my latest card order from a few different online sites. Since they're coming from several different people, a host of unfamiliar return addresses show up in the mailbox, and I just assume they're coming from ebay or sportlots. Then I opened one envelope and the above Christmas greeting came out. You'll notice the salutations are in French. It says "best wishes." It's not an owl, but a penguin is close enough when he's carting a sleigh of goodies. The return address was in French, too, from Quebec. When I opened the card, a baseball card was attached inside. This is that card: Now, if you read the post that I wrote on obtaining a bunch of cheap-o 1980s Fleer cards from the baseballcardstore site, you know that I said that I had accumulated all of the '89 Fleer cards that I needed for the set from that site except for one: the Craig Biggio rookie card. I assumed the Biggio rookie, even t...

  Big news! I have a date set for the Greatest 100 Cards of the '80s countdown! I didn't want to post a date until I had whittled my list of card candidates down to the final 100. But I just did that today and ... wow, was that tough to do. As is often the case when I do long-form countdowns like this -- the Greatest Cards of the '70s, the Best Dodger Cards Ever Made -- I feel a bit sorry for the cards that just missed the cut. There is nothing wrong with those cards. And on another day, maybe they would make the countdown. But this is the kind of ruthless examination that you've come to expect on this blog and, so, I will deliver.   Here are five cards that did not make the final 100 but if the ranking went to 105 places, they would be there. Also, I'm going to give you a chance to vote one in!   1980 Topps Frank White I have long loved this card and have mentioned it a few times on the blog. It's one of the best All-Star cards made since I started collecting c...

  I decided to go a little deeper into my calculating of which players have the most cards in my collection. I wanted to further illustrate how dominant the late '90s/early '00s are when you're totaling up something like this. I also wanted to see who the top five non-Dodgers are in my collection, going beyond Nolan Ryan and George Brett. When you look deeper into numbers, that's when you catch mistakes. It turns out George Brett doesn't have the second-highest number of cards in my collection among players who haven't played for the Dodgers.   I somehow overlooked Reggie Jackson, who, of course, should have a lot of cards in my collection. I have 106 Reggie Jacksons, which is more than the 98 George Bretts.   The other mistake was in mentioning that Ron Cey was 37th on the list. He's actually 38th. I missed Roy Campanella. He appears in 143 cards in my collection, three more than Cey. Much like Jackie Robinson, precious few of the Campanellas in my collecti...

  Today is a big moment in my personal life. While I'm not shy about sharing personal details here, some stuff people just don't want to read on a card blog. But the occasion has me feeling thankful. And since this is the week to give thanks, I thought I'd devote a post to it. Consider it my entry in the Give Thanks Challenge , offered up by Trevor of the Bump and Run Football Card Blog. As always, I am thankful for finding the card blogging community a dozen years ago. Life hasn't been the same, and might I add, it's been all the better. I am thankful that I have an everyday writing outlet. Back in the day, if you wanted to write every day, you had to buy one of those girly diaries with the lock and pour out all your hopes and desires. Screw that. I just found a school notebook I wasn't using. And I mostly wrote about baseball stuff. Oh, and girls. I wrote about girls I liked. Thank goodness those notebooks are long gone. I am ever grateful that this blog led t...

    With the cards I received from Sportscards From The Dollar Store that I blogged about yesterday , Cody Bellinger stepped into 25th place on the list of the players with the most cards in my collection.   I've long wanted to know collection highlights like who has the most cards and such. For the many years that I was inventorying my collection, I dreamed of being able to spit back numbers like that on the off-chance anyone would ask and then award me with a cash prize.   The inventorying of my total collection is still going on, but I mentioned that I completed accounting for all the cards of individual baseball players in my collection a couple of months ago. And last night I figured out which players had the most cards sitting my card room.   I knew that all of the players with the most would be Dodgers. I've never considered myself a player collector -- and that's what makes an exercise like this interesting because I'm not controlling the puppet strings,...