Night Owl Cards

  I mentioned the other day that I bought a couple of cards with the cash that I received from my latest Beckett Vintage article. You saw the Campanella MVP card a few posts ago .   The other one was the 1960 Topps Tommy Davis card, and with that card, I have completed the 1960s Topps run of Dodgers cards.   No, I don't have the Ken McMullen rookie, or the Doug Camilli rookie. But those floating heads cards carry unreasonable prices because of the heads floating around with them (Rose, Uecker) and chances are good I will never own them. Even if I had the cash, it seems silly to buy a card for that price that looks like that.   So, except for those, I own all the Topps flagship Dodgers from the '60s.   It wasn't easy and it's taken decades. There were obstacles I never expected, like the price of the Bart Shirley-Grant Jackson card. I also had to overcome quite a bit of indifference early on, as I was just a wee-one during the back half of the '60s and most of th...

  Hey, guys! I've joined Trading Card Database!   I know, you never thought you'd see the day. I was the same way.   I wasn't eager to add another card thing in my life, especially not one that involved more filing of my collection as well as interacting with even more people on the interwebs.   The fact that certain collectors were pushing it like Amway members didn't help. Nor did the memory of other online card database systems disappearing forever.   But I decided to join anyway. Ever since my desktop computer died a couple of months ago, and my ancient spreadsheet that inventoried my collection along with it, I haven't had a good way to keep tabs on my entire collection.   I do keep track of certain key totals on the blog. I know the total number of cards I have and I know which players are represented the most in my collection. I'm good with knowing the amount of cards I have for maybe the top 200 or so guys.   But if you were to ask me "how many...

  This post is a product of spending a lot of time lately in the early '70s, in each of my hobbies, card collecting and music. While adding some of my recent 1970 Topps acquisitions to the binder, I paged over two very familiar cards, which are exactly 20 cards apart when paging by number. I'm going to focus on the fellow who arrives second in the set because he's a well-worn blog topic, someone whose fantastic cards were introduced to me during my early blogging days. Lowell Palmer is one of two new Legends of Cardboard in my continuing series . You might remember that players are only selected as a "Legend of Cardboard" if they are known more for their cards than their baseball career. And while certain moony-eyed women of the early '70s would argue, Palmer's fame rests with his cardboard, specifically his Joe-Cool specs, which appear in both the 1970 and 1971 Topps sets. Uniform and background aside, it's almost as if the 1970 and 1971 photos were t...

  I spent the weekend visiting my daughter and doing family things. That usually means time away from the blog and cards in general, but fortunately my daughter wanted to check out the antique mall and that means checking out the card bowl! If you don't remember, or haven't been following along, that is a ceramic bowl (or maybe it's wooden -- I don't know, I was distracted by cards) I found in a shop . That bowl contained individual vintage cards priced right. I visited the shop again yesterday, and while the wife and daughter entered and turned right, I immediately turned left and headed to the right corner, There, I found the familiar display case of mostly Yankees cards that I either wasn't interested in or were out of my price range. I quickly looked toward the table in the center where the bowl was. But there was no bowl. Oh man. Then I spotted a few nine-pocket pages of football cards over on a side shelf by a window. The first page contained 1977 Topps footb...

  As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, I have an article in the newest Beckett Vintage Collector magazine, which is the October-November issue. It should be on store magazine stands soon if not already.   I also mentioned that the article is about those famous "missing players" from Topps sets, those players active at the time when Topps issued a set without them. Virtually all of those cases came about because Topps and the player did not have an agreement.     I tried to find as many examples of these as I could. I've heard many of them before. The Bowman-Topps feuds that left players like Mickey Mantle, Ted Williams, Stan Musial, Jackie Robinson and Roy Campanella out of one set or the other. The famed Maury Wills absence from Topps sets until 1967. Rusty Staub and Mike Marshall in the '70s and more recent cases like Barry Bonds and Ichiro.   There were a lot more players who had licensing conflicts with Topps than I thought. Some of the lesser-known players...

  I received a Paul Lo Duca autograph of the unlicensed variety from Too Many Verlanders just the other day. I really appreciated Dennis reaching out to me because right away I thought "I somehow don't have a Lo Duca Dodgers autograph in my collection." I've been thinking about how close I am to 200 different Dodgers in autograph card form for a little bit now and Lo Duca would get me one Dodger closer! So when I received the card, I went right to the trusty Dodgers autographs binder and counted up what I had just to be sure ... and that's when I came across another Lo Duca auto. Damn, that's right. The mini Lo Duca auto! Mini Lo Duca has a page all to himself so I missed it the first time. So even with the Prizm Lo Duca I am still at 190 different Dodgers for whom I have autos. I thought this might be a good opportunity to look at which notable Dodgers have avoided getting into my autograph collection. I don't really seek out autograph cards, except fo...

  I received an email yesterday from Bob of the best bubble , informing me that my other Beckett magazine article is out. This one is about my Dodgers fanhood and is in the latest Beckett baseball magazine. I don't have a subscription to that, so I'll have to wait until I have time to find a Barnes & Noble or grocery store that's carrying it. I need the extra time anyway because I haven't even devoted a post yet to my article that is in Beckett Vintage Collector this month. So with two magazine articles out now, and writing almost every day on this blog, and an actual job that involves -- guess what? -- writing, it's obvious that writing is what I do. What I like to do. What I need to do. Who I am, basically. But how did I get here? You'd have to go back to when I was a kid with a flourishing and overwhelming need to read. I read as a child a lot. From Sesame Street books to the Hardy Boys to The Bronx Zoo. By the time I was about 10, just about the only thi...