Night Owl Cards

    This is post No. 5500 on the blog. Not that the number means all that much, unless you tell someone outside the hobby that you've written 5,500 blog posts about accumulating cards. That will probably draw some sort of reaction.   To them -- most of them anyway -- it's all just mindless accumulation. It's all stuff for the throw-out man eventually. But to me, and the people who read this -- this blog isn't FOR YOU, people who think cards are dumb -- every card added has meaning. It fits into a specific category that pays tribute to whatever thing -- baseball, player, year, hobby -- that means something to that collector.   There's probably no more appropriate time than to go through some recent pickups -- wildly unconnected -- that have been occupying space on my card desk for too long. Yeah it's another show-off post. I'm 5500 posts in now, I can't change.   This will illustrate exactly how many kinds of cards I think are important and also that I

  It's another day and another set complete. Another fairly easy one, too. I've wanted to complete the 1983 Topps Glossy Send-Ins set for a long time, probably ever since I discovered from an advertisement inside a pack of 1983 Topps that you could send away for some totally new cards from Topps that were ... glossy!!! Glossy was the original shine in cards, I've discussed this before. Long before the '90s came up with foil and dufex and chrome, shiny cards were glossy cards. They were definitely appealing to youngsters of the time, like me. Why else would I bide my time accumulating enough scratch-off "loser contest cards" to send in for five cards at a time? (The glossy cards were kind of a consolation for not winning one of the big prizes from the scratch-off game, like I wanted any of those big prizes anyway). If my math and memory is right I gathered enough cards to go through the process four separate times. These are the cards I've had since 1983: A

    I had another post planned for today, had the cards pulled and ready to scan, but death had other plans. You know the old superstition that notable deaths come in threes? Well how about finding out three well-known baseball figures of my younger days died within a 24-hour period? That's an unsettling ramp-up. It started yesterday afternoon and it's still going. Ken Holtzman. Gone. Whitey Herzog. Gone. Carl Erskine. Gone. All three have meaning in my young rooting life, Erskine the most obvious, though I never saw him play. I'll start with him because that's where I have the most to say.    Carl Erskine was on one of the first five 1956 Topps cards I ever owned. I've mentioned before that when we received a bunch of '56s from my dad's co-worker, my brothers and I split them up and decided that all the cards of each person's favorite team would go to that person (my one Orioles-loving brother got screwed). Erskine arrived with Newcombe, Randy Jackson,