Night Owl Cards

  I have a couple of blog updates, mostly only of interest to me, before I get to tonight's topic. So, skip to where the sign says "start reading now" if you aren't interested in personal blog business.   1. I finally figured out how to make sure a thumbnail photo appears with my latest blog post on everyone's blog roll, and I also figured out how to make sure the right photo appears in the thumbnail.   I was raging about my frustration with this a few posts ago and I got the impression that no one knew what I was talking about (or no one cared). But after seeing blog post after blog post -- and also a lot of other people's blog posts -- showing up on blog rolls without thumbnail photos, I knew it was more than just me dealing with this issue.   The way to ensure that a thumbnail photo appears with your updated post on everyone's blog rolls is to make sure that you size at least one of the images in your post "original size". If you want the fir...

    Anyone who wished that the end of 2020 meant the end of Topps/artists projects like Project 2020 clearly didn't notice the popularity of the project. The same goes for online-exclusive cards, "living sets" and pop culture-influenced cards. You may choose to ignore it -- and I do, all the time -- but all of the above is here to stay. There are enough collectors purchasing stuff, at least for now, for Topps to go back to the well over and over. Topps loves beating concepts to death and as long as people are signing up, Topps will ride it until even the idea itself is crying "ENOUGH!" Project 2020 is living on in something called "Project 70," which is using Topps' 70th anniversary this year as the name tie-in. For Project 70, Topps has added far more than the 20 artists working on the Project 2020 series and several artists have released an advertisement flyer alerting people of the project. The catalog of artists includes ones that were in on Pr...

  The 1991 Score set is 30 years old this year.   As staggering as that is to hear, it seems about right in other ways. I have written about 1991 Score a whole bunch on this blog and references to it span the life of the blog -- 2009, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2018, 2019 all contain words dedicated to the blue, teal, black and white. I finally completed the 893-card monster a little more than a year ago and talked about it some more then, too. So, really, what I'm trying to do here is get another completed set out of the way in my Team MVPs series. I have reached 1981 in my reverse trip through history but continue to back-track as I complete more recent sets. This is me continuing to back-track with '91 Score. The only other thing I'll mention here before we get to the best card for each team in the set is to say I always wished Score would have picked a border color/theme for this set and stuck with it instead of four different colors (one being very early 1990s). The black-borde...

  I once called the cards that make up the 1970 Topps set " kindergarten cards ," as that's the year I started kindergarten. But that's not completely accurate. The pictures my mom took tell me I didn't start school until September of 1970. If card availability in 1970 was anything like it was during the mid-to-late '70s, there were no cards to buy when I was riding the big, yellow bus for the first time. It's a little more accurate to call 1970 Topps "preschool cards." The cards from 1968-70 are "preschool cards" and the cards from 1966-67 are "toddler cards." The 1965 Topps set is my "birth year set" and anything from 1971 forward, well, that's the "buried in homework" era.   Not that long ago a guy named Ken contacted me and offered up a few cards from the "toddler" and "preschool" eras, specifically 1967 and 1970 Topps, two sets that feature want lists on my blog because supposed...

  The Baseball Hall of Fame will announce the selections for the Class of 2021 tomorrow. The usual Hall watchers are laser-focused on this day, torches and pitchforks prepared.   Personally, I don't care. It was a lot of fun seeing players from the '70s and '80s go into the Hall, but now that most of the players up for election are from the '90s or even '00s, I've lost interest. A lot of these people played when I was barely following baseball. I am not invested.   The first time I paid attention to a Hall class was at the dawn of the 1980s, I don't think I even knew what the Hall of Fame was the first few years I was following baseball. The 1980 class included Duke Snider, which is why I cared. Al Kaline, Tom Yawkey and Chuck Klein also were honored. The 1982 Class made a big impact on me. Hank Aaron and Frank Robinson in that class. Those '80s classes were epic. Greats from the '50s, from "long ago," were enshrined. That was the hall to m...