Night Owl Cards

  Happy Halloween to those who celebrate, and that's a whole bunch, as I've never seen more Halloween lights displays in my entire life. Somebody is making a lot of money. I've posted off-and-on for the holiday, depending on my schedule (and whether I'm fending off kiddies at the front door). In the early days of this blog, myself and others might try to dig up an orange baseball card for the occasion. You remember when all you could find to represent the night of ghouls and goblins was a lousy 1988 Donruss Baseball's Best or some random orange parallel? Heck, it's all I could find last year . Well, Topps has you covered this year. For its Update set, which often comes out around Halloween (but not always), Topps has issued Panini-like parallels with Halloween themes. The background for individual players' cards have been replaced by dancing ghosts , Jack-o-Lanterns , black cats and other spookies. (They remind me of the Peanuts special ). There are also pl...

    It's been a long time since I've written a post like this and thank goodness. These are the most crushing kind but also the most necessary. I woke up this morning to the news that Ben had passed away over the weekend . He was 43. Longtime blog readers probably remember him, he was the one who wrote Cardboard Icons , one of the OG blogs, it began two months before mine. I remember being excited to see his blog because he was a newspaper writer, his blog handle at the time was "Newspaperman". I found someone who understood my line of work. He got out of the business maybe a year or two later and, like me, wrote for Beckett magazine for a time. He moved on to work as a community service officer in California where he lived. Ben was very active in the hobby and on Twitter/X. He was up on the latest hobby trends and card sets. His collections were BIG to my eyes. He had a crazy collection of baseballs that had one thing in common -- they each had hit a major league ba...

  When you have incoming card packages constantly arriving as a blogger, clutter isn't something confined to the stacks of cards, envelopes, notes, those cut-up pages of three pockets and top-loaders and penny sleeves galore, clogging up space on desks and tables and floors. It's also the clutter that you see in your phone gallery and on the desktop of your computer. I often take pictures of arriving cards for future posts and then they sit and stare at me for weeks, I think the little photo icons are actually stamping their unseen feet impatiently, until I finally write about them. I hate being stared at almost as much as I hate to-do clutter. There is also one whale of a box of incoming cards that has no space to land (it's sitting on the floor trying to avoid being kicked right now). So I've got to make way. Here is where I'll start: I received an envelope -- or was it two, don't recall -- from Torren' Up Cards recently. One of the items was an unopened, ...

  It's World Series time starting tonight, what's sure to be my least-watched World Series since probably the late '90s. I'm not one of those "it's baseball, I'll watch no matter what" fans anymore, not at this time of the year. The game's changed too much for me to be in love with it that much. I will let "I was at work" be my excuse for not watching, but even on off days, like this weekend, I'll tune in for maybe a few innings. I still need to have a rooting interest, that's always a given. This year, it's easy. I have no allegiance to the Rangers at all -- they have three ex-Dodgers on their team, that's the most appeal they have for me -- but at least they're not snakes. I don't like the Diamondbacks, I never will, they've done so many things as an organization that makes me not take them seriously and even if they win the World Series, I still won't take them seriously. Put them in the NL West with my ...

  OK, I'm back to the big box of cards-and-such from Johnny's Trading Spot . This is the baseball portion of the box. I'm still not done sorting through it. He sent two long boxes packed with Dodger cards. Apparently one box used to house a 1985 Fleer set? I just completed that set a couple months ago, I'd still rather complete it traditionally than buy the whole thing at once, although for what I want that's left from the '80s, I may be done with traditional means. So with all those Dodgers -- a lot of them from the '90s and early '00s -- I'm on round two of going through the boxes because you miss those dumb parallels and other things. It's actually quite fun finding stuff the second time. There are a bunch of parallel needs now. The color parallels like the Gypsy Queen Jansen jump right out at me, but stuff like the '96 Stadium Club Martinez and the '96 Fleer glossy thingies (there was a lot of '96 in those boxes) got past me until...

  Hey, here's another post dropping during a Game 7. But no worries. There's no expiration date on these. Although, personally, if the Diamondbacks are going to win, I'd rather be reading blogs. For this edition of the 1975 Topps countdown, I thought I'd mention what goes into my rather arbitrary ranking of this set. With the set I love so much, there are a lot of emotions at work and it's hard to convey why I like a card more than another a lot of the times for '75. But here is what I'm considering: 1. The impact of the player on the card. If everything's equal, the player's impact wins out. But other things come into play, for instance I didn't rank the Indians team card higher even with Frank Robinson on it, because it's a tiny inset picture. 2. The color combinations and whether they match. Matching border colors with team colors is a lot of fun in this set. The wild clashing is fun, too, but matching is more important here. 3. The photo ...