Night Owl Cards

  I don't spend a lot of time checking how many cards I have of each player but it's fun to do from time to time.   As someone who collects sets first and then my team, player collection totals are a natural subset of those and easy to categorize on TCDB or on whichever favorite counting spreadsheet you prefer. Also, unlike set or team collecting, the totals change fairly often.   When Johnny's Trading Spot sends out one of his "inventory cleanser" packages, I can't help but notice those player totals because the guys he's scrapping stand out.   Alex Verdugos   Up to 87 cards. 153rd on the list.     Dalton Rushings   43 cards. 471st on the list.     Tony Gonsolins   75 cards. 189th on the list.     Walker Buehlers (still haven't come to terms with his Padre-ness)   287 cards. 20th on the list.     Duke Sniders   318 cards. 16th on the list.      Shawn Green and (tiny) Fernando Valenzuela...

  You fellow '70s kids know already that M is for Martha , but fortunately there are collectors in our corner of the ridiculous internet that know that M is also for More Cards.   Johnny has been sending sequels to his recent card distributions and I received my second share about a week ago. He's still ridding himself of players who start with M that no longer live up to his standards. My last package was filled with Max Muncys.   This package was filled with ... no, not Willie Mays ...   Dustin May.   Lots of needed parallel action there. Now that May is with his third team in three years, it's safe to say he's not going to be the future star promised by his prospect cards. I could've told Johnny that quite awhile ago (and gotten my cards earlier!). May just couldn't put it all together -- or stay away from killer salads.           Mmmmmmmmm. Those hit the spot. Mighty nice of John to send them.     There was also one Max Mu...

  I don't know about you other bloggers but sometimes I have big plans for this blog, but the plans are too big and halfway in the middle of prepping, I look at the clock and I have to pivot to Plan B or Plan C. I don't mean to say that anything in Plan B or Plan C is second-best, it's just not what I had planned for today.  I had planned the next installment of the 1975 Topps Worst-To-Best Countdown, it's well overdue, but it's not ready yet. (I guess this is why people schedule posts in advance, but I can't get myself to do that).   So I'll show off what appeared in an absolutely giant box of cards that Johnny's Trading Spot sent me probably a couple of weeks ago now. I've been sorting through it ever since and I'm still not done with the baseball part. I am finished with the non-baseball stuff, so let's go with that in Part 1. John very nicely sent me a full set of 2021 Topps Chrome Tennis. I have mentioned a time or two that I'm inte...

  I've reached a realization that's been coming for awhile now. Over the past six or seven years, the quest to pursue every Dodgers card has grown more and more ludicrous to me.    I've known that it's an impossible quest and I've known that probably since the early days of this blog. But even then, even after everything that happened in the 1990s, "collecting them all" still seemed like something I could rationalize. Things hadn't gotten quite so ridiculous. Then, around 10 years ago or so, we started seeing stuff like inserts being paralleled in earnest. Then, around the same time, card companies got into online exclusives and then those exclusives started being issued weekly. Then Panini issued Chronicles, which is sets within a set with multiple parallels of parallels. Then Topps started creating parallel sets, things like Allen & Ginter Chrome. Then Topps started issuing multiple chrome brands, cosmic and sonic and bionic and moronic.   It...

  You've probably heard that Buffalo got hit with an unfathomable amount of snow. Well, "unfathomable" to people who don't live where you get snow, but still it was a lot, even for us "three-feet-is-nothing" types. Totals are at 6-plus feet in some spots (my brother who lives there just got a little under three feet). I live 3.5 hours from that wonderful city but Buffalo and Watertown are on the same path when it comes to lake-effect snow. We don't get it a lot -- it usually travels to the south of us, that's why no one lives in those spots -- but when the wind is right and Buffalo gets it, we get it, too. We sure got it. We're up to nearly five feet of snow where I'm sitting. I think it's done, but after the last three days I'm a little snow-shy and will believe it when I wake up in the morning and look out my window. I defend where I live to warm-weather types quite a bit, but I admit this weekend I was genuinely wondering why I liv...