Night Owl Cards

  Joey Votto announced his retirement yesterday in his usual quirky-and-lovable way . It was another sad reminder that my old gang is breaking up. First Evan Longoria and now Joey Votto. I'll explain. I feel an odd kinship with the rookie class from 2008, at least those players who received rookie logos in 2008 product. That's because I started when they started. I began a blog in 2008, and that was the first year that I was fully into modern cards since the early '90s. I returned to modern collecting in 2005 and 2006 but 2008 was when I became aware of everything, every last dumb product available, because the wonderful blogging world had told me so.   So I knew all the rookies that were around that year, hot or lukewarm. You couldn't miss them, card companies were shoving them down our throats. Ross Ohlendorf, Brian Bass, Kevin Hart (no, not the comedian), Chin-Lung Hu, I knew all their names.   There were some decent players, too, guys like Jay Bruce, Carlos Gonzalez...

More than two months ago I "celebrated" a birthday. "Celebrated" is in quotes because you don't really celebrate birthdays at my age. You mark them grudgingly and take solace that it should be a 24-hour time block free of irritation. But beyond that, I wasn't in the mood for celebrating because I knew by that time that the cash I usually receive for my birthday, that I would normally spend on cards, would have to be saved for the possibility that it would be spent on bills. Oh, that's ugly. So, yes, there was cake and ice cream and people and presents and a night out and songs and all that. But what's a birthday without being able to buy cards? That's not really a birthday to me. If I was younger I would've thrown a tantrum and shut myself in my room the whole day. But those days are long gone and I grimly accepted my fate. I held on to that birthday money for two months. Some days I was just a pen stroke or keyboard stroke away fr...

A couple of weeks ago, I put together a list of the five most pointless baseball card sets of the last five years . As someone who had been collecting and writing about cards for the same amount of time, I figured I was as worthy as anyone else. That post was basically met with a collective yawn, except for some people who wanted to know why Documentary wasn't on the list. But lack of positive reinforcement has never stopped me before (which explains why I've been working the same job for so long), so I am continuing on the same theme. Except this time, I'm rating the most memorable sets of the last five years. This wasn't quite as easy to do as finding the most forgettable/pointless. After eliminating high-end sets (nothing that doesn't reach the collecting masses can be called memorable), I ended up with eight sets that I thought qualified. I was forced to whittle it down to five. And none of those sets are from anything more recent than 2009. Make of tha...