Night Owl Cards

MLB has big plans for Opening Day tomorrow: every team playing at locations around the country on April 1. No April Fool's joke. That's the schedule.   It's supposed to snow where I live. Three inches, some places more.   The forecasts aren't so great for several game locations tomorrow. The temperature in Detroit is expected to peak at 33 degrees. In Chicago, 37 degrees. In Cincinnati, 39 degrees. It could rain in New York, Philadelphia and Boston.   I'm expecting some rough openings. But, no big deal. After last year? We're going to get baseball somewhere as scheduled! I'm pretty darn excited. Even if it snows here. Even if I have to work. It's nice to know that a 162-game schedule is planned. I am as ready as I've ever been, and, yes, the Dodgers winning the World Series last year has a lot to do with that. For the first time in the 12 years of this annual post, I don't have to use a 1988 card for the Dodgers! OK, so I have to use a 2020 card ...

  There is really no explanation for me suddenly being able to make such swift progress on the 1956 Topps set other than that "the stars aligned." For decades, the total number of '56 Topps cards in my collection sat at around 120, each one obtained on a single, glorious early 1980s evening, a gift from my dad's co-worker, someone I had never seen and I still don't know his name. Those were the cards that ignited the spark, that this was indeed one of the greatest sets ever made and would be amazing to complete ... you know, in another dimension, where objectives that were obviously impossible became possible. Sure, I now owned one-third of the set. But outside of the Newcombe, Erskine and Slaughter cards, I had no big stars. None of the cards were Yankees, the team of choice of whoever gave us the cards. Then the rest of the 1980s happened and cards became "an investment." The prices for those '56 cards, especially the stars, shot up. As the years m...

HEY! DID YOU SEE I COMPLETED THE '78 KELLOGG'S SET AND I TOOK A PICTURE OF ALL OF THE CARDS TOGETHER IN ONE PHOTO??!??!???   (Geez, you're a lot harder to impress here than on Twitter).   Maybe I'm posting on too many outlets. I guess I shouldn't start that youtube channel, huh?   So, anyway, cards are still flowing into the night owl nest at a good clip even though I haven't succumbed to the charms of TCDB, "the best place to trade". Why just recently I received a healthy-sized stack of cards from Rod of Padrographs . I'm pretty certain that he entered a group break or two to grab some Dodgers for me. Either that or I had some sort of out-of-body experience and impersonated a Padres fan while I acquired Dodgers cards. Weird. I have some recollection of watching a Nachos Grande group break series that I didn't enter and then hoping no good Dodgers were pulled (I don't know why I do that to myself). I'll bet Rod had the Dodgers in that ...