Night Owl Cards

  I have a couple of 1975 Topps-centric posts to publish before the 50th anniversary year of my favorite set -- and my first year of buying cards -- is through.   This is the first of those posts. Ten years ago I wrote " A history of 1975 Topps tributes ," in which I documented all of the '75 Topps themed cards that I had known up to that point. It was pretty thorough, but it's 10 years old now and there have been so many more tributes since.   In that post I asked readers for other examples and said I'd add them to the post. But I didn't do that. I even forgot the post existed.   The only reason I'm updating it now is reader Dave kept commenting on it with other 1975 examples. He provided several in 2022. Perhaps I noticed that then, but I forgot about it again. Then, at the start of this month, he offered up another example. That got me to finally address this and provide an update.   So let's start with some of Dave's examples. One of them, the ...

  This is the first card I received from 2025 Topps Update. It's a foil parallel of the Miguel Rojas card. I grabbed it in a giveaway on Bluesky. We have to have our World Series heroes in our collection.   I haven't bothered to go looking for Update, I'm pretty much done with that dance. If I'm not thrilled with the design then there's no reason to collect a set with a bunch of filler. I'll just take my team set, thank you. And that arrived today.   Not the most exciting 14 cards, I saw that coming when I reviewed the checklist. There's both good and bad in that.       THE GOOD   Update went wild on relievers this year. I've seen a few mentions of that from other team collectors when they received their team sets. I know the set design make it difficult to read but that's Evan Phillips, Jack Dreyer, Anthony Banda, Blake Treinen, Alex Vesia and Roki Sasaki (not a reliever except in the postseason). No Tanner Scott though, which is kind of funny. ...

  About three weeks ago, Johnny's Trading Spot held a giveaway for his readers, randomizing off 350-plus cards from one of his many, many, many finds.   Most of the cards were of the magazine variety from Baseball Cards Magazine and the like from the late 1980s and early 1990s. I'm very familiar with those, having come across them back in the day and also through adding the Dodgers to my collection.   They are pretty cool though nothing I look to collect (except the ones modeled on the 1975 Topps design). When Johnny displayed what was up for the giveaway, my eyes instead gravitated toward a nine-pocket page that contained a certain oddball from the 1960s.   I didn't think more of it, the chances of getting that page wasn't great, there were 30 different pages offered up!    Well, lo and behold, I ended up landing page #18, the majority of which were 1968 Game cards.     I don't know how but I gamed the system!   Outside of the one Dodger in...

  If I compiled a list of all the major-release movies from the late 1980s and then a separate list of my top five "most glaring nonviews," I believe "Dead Poets Society" would be at the top of the shorter list.   I watched just about every movie that came out in the late '80s, that's what I was doing then, going out with the girlfriend, eating at restaurants and going to the movies. On a weekly basis. Somehow I missed "Dead Poets Society".   No big deal. The movie is so well-known that I know the plot and the actors and many of the quoted phrases: "Seize the Day," "O Captain, My Captain". I'm not a movie watcher anymore so I'll probably never go back and see it or anything else that's on my top five misses.   While I was doing all that movie-watching in the late 1980s, Topps was creating cards that also referenced a captain. Two each, in fact. No, it wasn't a Topps homage to the Walt Whitman poem. Topps included...

(With the busy week ahead, I'm not sure how many posts I'll get in this week. Per usual I'll try my best. My goal every day is to post. Anyway, here's one now! Time for Cardboard Appreciation. This is the 359th in a series):    This card arrived in my collection yesterday. It's another box checked in the slow, slow quest for all of the Dodgers in the 1960 Leaf set.   This set doesn't get a lot of love. The photos are black and white. It's all portrait shots. It gets made fun of because Leaf packaged it with a marble instead of gum. But I have always liked it. I grew up on the late 1970s Renata Galasso/TCMA set that mimicked the 1960 Leaf design. I loved those TCMA cards. I thought the design was clean and satisfyingly old-school.   The first five Leaf Dodgers weren't tough to get, not even the Duke Snider. Black-and-white photos, you know.   The final three are another matter. Those who know this set are aware that the second half of the set (cards 73-14...

  Needed a fun, short post for a Friday and the mail carrier delivered. I'll try to remember this when the post office eats my ESE (ebay standard envelope) order.   A couple of weeks ago I received an alert on one of my ebay searches for the Ron Cey MSA discs. Someone had put up for sale one of the final four I needed. It had been a good while since I had seen one I didn't have.   Unfortunately:   That next word after "Very" is "Scarce". Yeah, OK, buddy. There's no way I'm paying that for an unlicensed disc that looks like a bunch of others already in my collection. Just to confirm that this was a rip-off, I found someone else selling like 15 MSA discs of the same Red Barn variation for $15. There was no Ron Cey in the lot, unfortunately, but I thought about getting it anyway. Sadly, someone scooped it up while I was thinking. (The Red Barn back has two varieties, one with an address on the back and one without. But this seller doesn't mention wh...