Night Owl Cards

  It's been a fairly stressful week, between traveling, a delayed doctor's appointment, the loss of a beloved player from my youth, and now the most taxing World Series matchup I could possibly conjure up as a fan. The weekend will help a little (stupid sports teams still have to play on the weekend, tho) and so will the collection. I just happen to be wrapping up a super-simple sportlots order with the final cards trickling in. I like simple orders. Big-ticket and super-cool arrivals are always fun but they contain a certain amount of worry what with prices paid and condition concerns. Simple orders are just simple cards, they don't cost much but still they fill holes and are always wanted.   Some of those cards were upgrades and they've already been filed away with a smile. A 1983 Topps Ron LeFlore, a 1986 Fleer Bobby Castillo, items that should have always been pristine but weren't, and I was horrified. But now the monster is back in the closet.   Others were reg

  I know some readers have been expecting me to write about Fernando Valenzuela after news of his death. A few comments on the last post mentioned him even though I cited him just once in passing. I learned of the sad news as I ended work around midnight Tuesday. The work schedule is unrelenting midweek these days. This is why I almost never post on Wednesdays now, so there was no chance to get to it yesterday. But I was devastated. Valenzuela is probably among my top 10 favorite Dodgers, or at least should be. His arrival synced perfectly with my budding interest in young stars -- a common teenage fixation -- and the Dodgers were happily accommodating with not only Fernando but Sutcliffe, Steve Howe, Sax, Guerrero, Rudy Law and a bunch of others. I lived far away from Los Angeles, so I have no tales to tell of nearly running into Valenzuela in Dodger Stadium or him signing a ball for me. But I did witness his MLB career from the very beginning. I've written about him a bunch

  I was out of town for a few days visiting my daughter.   She and her boyfriend have a new apartment, which is charming but very small, just like the last one. Housing is brutal for young adults these days. Because of that, mom and dad get a hotel room for the weekend.   That's where I saw the Dodgers finish off the Mets in the NLCS (and Juan Soto's HR ... gag). I turned on the hotel TV for the first time in years. The last big baseball event I remember watching in a hotel room was the All-Star Game in 2010. I hope the cheering Sunday didn't wake the neighbors. Oddly, my daughter is now a faithful Dodger fan. She's not interested in sports hardly at all. But I guess all those games I watched, while she sat in a chair as a teen not caring, had an effect. She got into the Dodgers around the time of their Series trip in 2017. She doesn't watch the games. Like most people her age, she gets an update on instagram or TikTok and she's good. But she knows enough to be

  Yes, the same card topping consecutive posts. Sorry about that, but I wanted to discuss this card for just a minute. This will be a short post. Bloggers, do you pull a card from your collection for a post and realize for the first time -- even though you've owned that card for decades -- that it's got issues???? That's what happened to me with the 1979 Topps Willie Stargell when I pulled it for my previous post. It had never been apparent to me in all the times I've owned it, that it contains two significant creases at the bottom of the card, one in the bottom left corner and one in the right. I didn't even realize it when I took a photo of it for the post, nor when I uploaded it. But if you stare at it closely now, you can see them. There, I circled them (badly) for you. I didn't notice them until I was returning the card to its page in the 1979 Topps album. I put my fingers on the bottom corner edge and felt it give. Crap! I have no idea when this card first

  Two straight posts on 1979! Hey, I guess I'm old! Forty-five years ago tonight was Game 7 of the 1979 World Series, when Willie Stargell clinched the Series for the Pirates, the most recent championship for the Pirates. That Series is notable for Stargell stars, "We Are Family," and some of the most colorful uniforms to appear together in a single WS. It's also the first World Series that I watched almost in entirety and the first Game 7 I saw to the end. Because of that, it's been one of my favorite World Series, and it helped that it came immediately after experiencing the Dodgers lose to the Yankees in back-to-back years. Finally, I had a relaxing series to watch in which the team I rooted for actually won. (This is still a rarity). I looked forward to 1980 Topps when I could see a few cards devoted to the '79 World Series as Topps had done in previous years. But, to my surprise, there was no recognition of the Series at all. It was the first time that To

  A month into this blog, I featured my copy of the 1979 Sport Americana Baseball Card Price Guide, which is the first of the James Beckett/Dennis Eckes annual price guides that I purchased all through the mid-1980s. I don't remember when I bought the '79 copy. I'm guessing 1980. It's shown up a time or two on the blog since. It's a cool peek into the past, starting with the cover, which looks nothing like the price guides to come -- no photos, just drawings. (The book is the rarer white-cover version). As you can probably tell, I've handled this book a lot -- pages have been falling out for years. Probably most of the damage happened in the first year because, let me tell you, there was nothing cooler than someone assigning prices to cards. What a concept -- which ones were ones that I had? Answer: In 1979, almost none.   I brought up this book a couple days ago over on the House of Cardboard Discord site because the topic came up on "when did the concept