Night Owl Cards

   The Dodgers are playing the Angels this weekend in another "Freeway Series"/interleague clash. This doesn't mean a whole lot to me. I've lived on the east coast my whole life, and was a baseball fan for more than 20 years before interleague play started.   But the Angels have popped up a couple of times recently in my fan and hobby pursuits. I've been struggling for blog topics lately. It's not just lack of time that's caused me to slow down here -- inspiration's been elusive when life is one demoralizing incident after another.   Then I received a quick envelope in the mail the other day from Batting Out of Order . Tom was clearing out some duplicates of the Angels, his favorite team, and sent a few from the 2005 Topps Update set.     That's fun. Remember when the Angels were good enough to beat the Yankees in the playoffs?   I haven't done much with my 2005 Topps set needs the last year or so. I'm only 29 cards away from finishing the ...

  This very fine card, acquired last week, met a pair of 1969 Topps "goals" for me, not that I officially established them as such.   First, Jack Aker was the last card numbered in the 600s that I needed (#612), so I now have every card from 600-664, which, as you know, are located in the high-number seventh series. This is great progress for a set that as recently as probably five years ago I had no plans to complete.   Second, Aker finishes off the Pilots team set. And since I wrapped up the 1970 Topps set last year, I now own all the Pilots cards that Topps created as far as flagship copies. I'm happy I have a blog to announce things like this!   I was quite proud of finishing the 1970 Pilots, and featured them back on JOTS, Chapter 23 . The '70 Pilots set is a little more appealing to the eye as most of the Pilots shown are actually wearing Pilots uniforms. That's not the case in '69 as the team hadn't made its debut until the 1969 set had been release...

  I went to a work Christmas party over the weekend. It was my wife's work, so I didn't know a lot of people there. That's always difficult for an introvert but at least there was good food! Often you're forced into small talk (eww) about mindless things. My wife knew almost everyone and was introducing a lot of them to me (really not necessary). Across the table sat a young man, maybe 23-25. My wife said he looked like actor Sean Penn. I'm not good at making famous people comparisons but this jumped right out at me, he definitely did look like Sean Penn. The young man, who I'm sure lives in one of the many rural towns in this area, said he didn't know who Sean Penn was. To help things along, I said Penn was once married to Madonna -- a pretty famous thing that happened in 1985. Almost no flicker of recognition. Certainly no response. OK. First, good for him for not caring. But second, HOW CAN YOU NOT KNOW WHO THESE PEOPLE ARE? Was 1985 that long ago?   Mayb...

  I've been listening to a lot of pop music from 1984 lately. Forty years ago, you know. I know I've said this before but every time I think about the number of people who didn't experience epic years like 1983 and 1984, I know why they're still searching for joy in their lives. I am so happy I was around for years like that. We all know -- those of us who were around then -- that in '84, pop music wasn't trash. Some of it was, of course, but not all of it, like how it's been for just about the last 20 years or more (referring only to Billboard charts pop music/most streamed songs on Spotify, etc. I listen to plenty of current music that is tremendous). When I hear 1984 pop songs like The Warrior, Round and Round, Lights Out, Rock You Like a Hurricane, Purple Rain, Dance Hall Days, Sister Christian, White Horse, The Politics of Dancing, Runner, What's Love Got to Do With It, 10-9-8, Jump, Cruel Summer, We're Not Gonna Take It and on and on, it takes ...

  The bit-by-bit, card-here, card-there strategy of adding to my collection the first couple of months of the year continues for just a couple more weeks.   But you can accomplish a lot even when cards are just trickling in. Just the other day I completed the gold parallel team set for the 2008 Topps Dodgers.   No, that doesn't include the Update set, the Kershaw is still out there (I landed more than a couple of the Kershaw rookie, along with the gold-letter version back in 08-09, but the goldie eluded me when his cards were cheap).   But this feels like an accomplishment to me. I honestly don't know if I've completed the gold parallels for any of the other Dodgers team sets since gold parallels became a thing. So I decided to try to finish a few of them, beginning with some of the easier ones. 2008 falls into that category.   I had a lot of them already -- wow was I accumulating Dodgers like mad in '08 and '09 -- so I needed just six more. In order, I added De...

  Whenever I add cards to my 1970 Topps set, the 1969 set is not far behind. I either add a few '69s at the same time or I have them on my mind when I'm thinking about 1970. Compared with 1970, I have a lot of work to do on '69 and it's difficult for me to see progress when I still have around 70 cards to go and a lot of big names and several upgrades, too. But I shouldn't think that way, I have made progress this year. A blog is good for charting that. When you're in a card funk, just look through the past year (which I'll be doing in detail next week) and you'll be amazed at the advances you've made. For example, upon reviewing I was surprised with all the 1969 cards I've picked up over the previous 12 months. I've really been at this '69 pursuit seriously for only the last year-and-a-half, spurred on by my (now former) co-worker's collection that I helped evaluate .   I checked my inventory to see which team sets that I had complet...

  I'm battling a dying keyboard on my laptop so I've been posting on my phone, both here and on the 1993 Upper Deck blog (new post over there, sorry I can't link right now!)   It's not fun, so posting has been/will be sporadic until there's a resolution. This also comes at a super-inconvenient time because I am working on not one but two Beckett articles this month.   The first one I will finish writing next week (I sure hope it won’t be on my phone). Then I'll start the next one. More on that later.   But first I want to do another Joy Of A Team Set post. I wanted to note another 1970s anniversary. A lot of that stuff happened 50 years ago now, you know.   I've already done a JOTS for the Swingin' A's, it was my very first Joy post. But what about the team the A's played in the World Series that year?   The 1973 Mets barely reached .500 but made it to the seventh-and-final WS game. That was a novelty then but fairly commonplace now with allowing...

  That figures, just when I was beginning to question whether there was anything left in the "Joy of a Team Set" series, a natural topic falls in my lap a day or two later.   I picked up a few cards for my 1970 Topps set quest over the last few weeks, most of them within the past week. Here's a pic:   All of these are noteworthy, although I suppose I don't have to say that when set-building. That's the beauty of set-collecting! Want to make every card feel special? Build a set.   But to spell it out a little more, the Jerry Koosman Sporting News All-Star is the second-to-last of that subset I need. Just Denny McLain left. The Hal Lanier, Jim Merritt and Jim French cards are all higher numbers, which is where most of my wants reside. I receive all three from a collector on Twitter, Mike, and they're from his childhood collection. Awesome!   The Abernathy is cool because the stats on the back begin at 1955 and Topps includes all the minor league stops, too. But ...