Night Owl Cards

  What might that be? The Dodgers' second straight World Series title? The Bills' win over the infernal Patriots last weekend? Finally killing off the yellowjacket infestation underneath the siding in August?   Nah.   My biggest win of the year was landing the prize in the vintage giveaway over at The Diamond King a couple of weeks ago. In keeping with the season, DK has been giving away a bunch of cards from his collection. I waited out the numbered and prospect lots and I was rewarded. Vintage! Sweet, sweet vintage.   As a veteran vintage collector, I saw cards in the lot that I already owned, but that didn't stop me from entering because there were several cards I didn't own, including cards on freshly made want lists! Plus, I could always do a giveaway myself with the extras.   There was so much variety in this group that it took me awhile to figure out how to present it here. I'm still not sure that this won't turn out to be rambling without any direction...

    I've written about this card a few times on this blog. It's the first autographed card I ever bought, at one of the first card shows I ever attended back when I was a teenager.   It was a pretty savvy move at the time, though I was not thinking of getting a deal or anything like that. Still the value of Koufax cards and Koufax autographs have shot up in the decades since. I'm very happy I have it.   But my main focus as a collector has not been autographs, it's completing sets and completing Dodgers team sets. Because of that, this Koufax card has always stood in the way. Since it's autographed, I never considered it part of the 1961 Topps Dodgers team set, though I list the set complete on checklists, like on TCDB.   While attending the monthly show in town over the last few months, I've noticed that the one dealer I go to all the time had a 1961 Koufax under glass. Just your regular, "ordinary" '61 Koufax, no signature scrawling on it.   I...

Baseball cards might be the most hostile environment for black-and-white images. We will fawn over black-and-white paintings, marvel at black-and-white photography framed on a wall, present awards to black-and-white movies, but don't you dare give us a baseball card set full of black-and-white players. Black-and-white photos do appear in sets these days, but it's always confined to a limited number of cards. Take this year's Stadium Club as an example. There are select black-and-white photos that collectors have oohed and aahed over, but the majority of the set is in color. That's the way it's been, for decades and decades. If you're going to do black-and-white, keep it to a limited number of cards, and for the love of cardboard, don't make the entire set black-and-white. One of those Stadium Club cards got me curious. How many black-and-white sets could I find since the days when full color photography made its entrance? I went through my Dodgers b...

Sometimes it's best to keep memories repressed. I don't ever want to recall that Orel Hershiser pitched for the Giants, let alone get a cardboard reminder in the mail. However, in one way I am glad that this Hershiser card is featured here. Because that means the trade deadline is over, I can exhale, and this is a harmless baseball card trade post, rather than a "why, oh, why did the Dodgers trade half their team for Roy Halladay " post. Halladay is still spending his Loonies in Toronto. As it should be. (Meanwhile, I just read that the Dodgers were supposedly close to a deal with the Padres in which they would have acquired Adrian Gonzalez and Heath Bell for James Loney , Russell Martin, Blake DeWitt , James McDonald and Ivan DeJesus Jr. Holy Smokey! Do people who run the Dodgers know the team has had the best record in baseball for almost the entire season?) The Hershiser nightmare card came to me from Mark of Stats on the Back . He's been giving...