Night Owl Cards

  I've been tired of the emphasis on the rookie card in Topps products for years. I don't know how many posts I've devoted to rookie-overkill, but it's certainly a running theme and I'm sure it's boring some readers to tears.   I do know that Topps, and the hobby, has been about rookies, and young players in general, for a long, long time. I'm thinking of the Sporting News Rookie Stars subset in 1959 Topps and similar themes that came after, followed by the multi-player rookie card themes throughout the 1960s, '70s and early '80s.   Then there are the rookie trophies and rookie cups, the All-Topps teams. Those have been around for quite awhile, since 1960!   But obviously the focus is on those youngsters even more these days and you could point to various moments all the way to the present in which Topps (or other card companies) ramped up that focus, through special subsets, inserts, autograph cards, short-prints, etc.   Today I'm pointing at 19...

  I finally received a sportlots order today. It's my second order of the year from the site and this time I went with the box shipment to save myself some money.   I was questioning myself for doing it while waiting because gosh does it take awhile. It was only a month, it turns out, but it certainly seemed longer. I know I've been through this before (and written about it) but the saving sometimes don't seem worth it during the wait.   I usually reserve sportlots orders for plugging a few team set needs or set needs in general, but not for super-vintage cards in most cases. Sportlots isn't great for knowing what the cards look like when you buy them (it seems to have cut back even more on the pictures in fact). So stuff like Kellogg's cards is out.   I don't know how much these arrivals will interest people but who cares? This blog thing is here for showing my cards, nobody else needs to like them but me.   Here we go, I mean, why all the 2021 Stadium Club Ch...

  Something that Johnny's Trading Spot wrote on one of his recent posts got me curious. He mentioned his ranking on Trading Card Database in terms of all cards entered -- or how many cards you have in your collection, according to TCDB.   I knew all about totaling your collection on the site, but I didn't know you could compare it with other TCDBers' total collections the way you can with total cards of players in your collection or total cards of teams in your collection.   I was immediately intrigued -- and had no idea how to find that information. I looked around for a little bit before my patience ran out after 5 minutes and I emailed Johnny. Turns out it's way at the bottom of TCDB's main page where the columns of links are listed. In the last column is a link called "Stats," which is where I found the info.   Here are the bad boys who lead the way:   Good grief, that's a lot of cards.    I knew right away that I wouldn't be anywhere near the...

  Wow, not off to the greatest start for Year 18 with this blog. Posting is likely to be a bit sporadic the next couple weeks. Nothing unfortunate, just one of those life whirlwinds where a bunch of disconnected things come together to conspire against my hobby.   Just as this busy period got started, I was getting my lunch on Saturday when my wife dropped the mail on the counter. The October/November Beckett Vintage Collector jumped right out to me. "Here already?" I said.   I turned the pages and there was the second article I wrote for them this past spring.     I did not expect to see this issue until early October. That was about the time the August-September issue arrived (early August) and -- wham -- a month later I'm discussing my latest article. I'm not used to the magazine world moving so fast! Isn't this "old media"?   The cover teases to my story this time, always a little thrill in itself.   And speaking of thrills, yes, this article was i...

  This is Night Owl Cards at 17.   On this date in 2008, I started a card blog when it was about the coolest thing you could do in the hobby outside of pulling a card of Kosuke Fukudome. Today, it's not a very cool thing at all and whatever happened to Fukudome, Nick Blackburn and Callix Crabbe?   But this is still me. None of those other hobby outlets have suited me as much. I'm not immune to chasing the bright new thing, but I still keep coming back here. Writing about the hobby in a detailed way will always appeal to me most.   That doesn't mean I'm not cutting back on the hobby in other ways: not in words but in more physical aspects. You will see examples of this in Year 18 of NOC but for now, let's look back, using something I have collected for as long as I have written this blog and now their time is ending in my collection.   Wrappers!!!   I have tried to set aside a wrapper for any card product that I have opened -- but just one per set, I'm not t...