Night Owl Cards

  A couple of housekeeping things before I get to the topic tonight. First, I've figured out the issues I've had with commenting on some other blogs as well as, probably, why others sometimes can't comment on mine.   It comes down to Google being extra particular/unhelpful and requiring the Google Chrome browser for some blogs. I don't know why it's just some and not all. But it explains why I can comment on those difficult blogs at work because I use Chrome at work. Should've made that connection earlier.   Also, I'm still building stacks of Dodger cards for those who said they were interested. It's going to take a minute. March has slowed things down as it likes to do (its final kiss-off is really sucky weather this weekend). Hopefully next month I'll be sending packages out.   One of those collectors getting a gift of Dodgers is Jason, a.k.a., Heavy J , who recently took up the challenge of sending me Dodger cards I don't have already. This is...

  When I was a young, baseball-watching fool, I'd wonder about my dad. He was a fan, but he seemed so casual about it. He'd watch maybe an inning or two and then he'd get up and go out to the garage or do some other chore.   Even when he was watching he didn't seem to care. He didn't have as much knowledge about the players or teams as I did because he wasn't interested enough to learn. He was like that with a lot of sports (well, I guess football was the only other one. We didn't really watch any other sports).   Later I figured that's what happens when you get older, you lose interest. And it's true, I've lost interest in a lot about sports. I have not watched one single minute of the NCAA Tournament. I used to be invested. I'd always fill out brackets, at work or wherever. I'd get caught up in the early rounds and the upsets. When my daughter was turning 2 and we had a big birthday party, I had to be pulled away from the TV while watch...

  As a set-collector I have written many times about needing the final card to complete a set.   It's almost an ongoing issue for our collecting type -- I always seem to have three or four sets that are getting close to being finished and I either know what that final card is or I am speculating on what it might be.   Longtime readers may remember the One-Card Challenge, which I set up 13 years ago in a bid to help collectors find that one card that they need to finish a set. It was pretty popular for a few months before fading out. No coincidence, that was right around the time collectors were flocking to Twitter.   Today, I am one card away from finishing the 2024 Topps Update set. Finishing Update is usually not a big feat in the year in which it's issued, it's a smaller set and a lot of collectors are so done with the design by that time, plus it's known for being crammed with filler and plucked for rookies.   But finishing 2024 Update would be notable for m...

  In order to keep this series in my head and not forget about it for a year, I'm running another version of "Joy of a Subset" three months later, which is a little sooner than I'd like as I usually space them out more.  Tonight I'm going way back, to what you could argue was the first "out-of-the-box" topic for a subset in Topps history.   Subsets were a new idea for Topps in the '50s. If you define subsets by how I knew them in the 1970s, they are at least three consecutively numbered cards, all sharing the same theme. Topps' first experience with that approach is in 1958 with the 21-card Sport Magazine All-Stars that come at the end of the set.   The All-Stars return in 1959, but using The Sporting News as the sponsor. The Sporting News appears again in the set with a string of 31 "Rookie Stars of 1959" all featuring the same red, white and blue background.    But as evidence that Topps embraced the subset idea completely, there was ...