Night Owl Cards

  Several years ago I announced on this blog that I wanted to complete all of Fleer's 1980s baseball sets.   After Topps, Fleer featured my favorite '80s cards and since all players shown on those cards are players from my youth, I wanted all of them.   Building on the ones I'd already completed, like 1984 and 1981 Fleer, I tackled the rest. I now have 8 of the 9 1980s Fleer flagship sets finished. 1987 Fleer is the last remaining one incomplete.   I don't have anything against 1987 Fleer, it just happened that way. In fact I like '87 more than some other '80s Fleer sets, like '86 and '89. But here we are. I need 70 cards to finish the set.   I mentioned not too long ago that I'm having trouble paying attention to this set build. The cards I do have sit in a box on the floor, they're not even set up in a binder waiting for empty pockets to be filled. There are so many other card completion interests that come before this one.   I find I don't...

  I finally completed the 2025 Heritage set last week (the first 500 cards, no way I'm tackling high numbers sets anymore).   The Pete Crow-Armstrong card is finally mine. It took me a year after I landed the second-to-last card to find a PCA card price I could stomach. As I mentioned earlier , my timing wasn't good as the price of the card started soaring just when I was finishing the final few short-prints.   It still was too much to pay, but the prices on the card have come down about 10 dollars and I was sick of looking at his face in ebay listings for months. So I paid up.    The arrival of that card closed the book on a three-year run of complete Heritage sets in the night owl nest with 2023, 2024 and 2025 Heritage finished. Each of those sets are tributes to the first three sets I ever saw, 1974, 1975 and 1976 Topps -- those sets mean the world to me, so I wanted to get those Heritage sets done more than any other.   I had planned to keep going, at l...

   I took a few days off to visit my daughter and check out her latest living quarters. She's moving up in the world -- literally -- she's got a second floor.   The first thing we did after checking into the hotel and getting some food is take in the Ringo Starr concert. Yes, Ringo, who just turned 86, is still touring and drumming and singing and holding up pretty well, at least as far as I could determine from my distant seats.   There he is front-and-center singing with Steve Lukather, the guitarist for Toto, during Ringo Starr and His All-Star Band's final concert of their 2026 fall tour. At far right is Colin Hay, the lead singer for Men At Work, and second from right, in the front, is Hamish Stuart, one of the singers in the Average White Band. Greg Bissonette, a yeoman drummer for Ringo's band, is playing the trumpet I believe at top right. I think this might be "With A Little Help From My Friends" if I've got the order right on my camera roll.   Th...

  I found out on Monday from Matt at the Diamond Jesters blog that a former card blogger, Johnny, a.k.a., hiflew, passed away over the summer.   I could have come across that news earlier if I was reading the TCDB forums regularly or on X, but because I don't want to spend all my time online, I keep my card outlets to the blogs and one or two other social media sites.   But back when I knew Johnny, blogs were about all there was. He ran Cards from the Quarry. He was one of the only Rockies collectors I've come across in my years of online collecting. He was easy to trade with because, my goodness, finally an outlet for my Rockies cards!   I traded a lot with Johnny, mostly between 2011 and 2014. Good times. There were a couple of other arrivals from him in 2017 and 2021 when he was doing some card selling (he always had good stuff), but, like many former bloggers, he found other places that he preferred more and that was TCDB.   I am not too active on TCDB be...

 (Greetings, thanks for squeezing me in between postseason viewings. I tried to squeeze in a card show over the weekend, the monthly one. I left without buying a thing, partly due to having limited interests this time around, finding nothing that intrigued me that I could afford and, the clincher, a collector's behavior that turned me off so much, I eventually left. This should be its own post, but I've actually griped about this same collector a few months ago. Time for something happier. Cardboard Appreciation. This is the 373rd in a series):   I added this 1991 Topps Desert Shield card of Kal Daniels last week thanks to CardBoredom, who was giving away assorted unwanted cards from his collection.   I didn't know there are two CardBoredom collecting sites until Baseball Cards Come to Life noted the one site in which David was giving away cards. I just knew the more long-form blog , which is full of well-researched accounts and stories, so well-done in fact that it drew...

  It seems like everyone's accepted the latest configuration of the postseason schedule, including me. In fact, I was pleasantly surprised that we began the playoffs in September as in ye olden times, though I know the reason for it is very modern.   But I think that this year's wild card round might show that we don't really need it. Yeah, yeah, I know, more games is good, but the Red Sox, Cubs, Astros and Phillies didn't look like playoff teams to me. We could've just skipped that round to what we've got right now.   Which is what I'm going to do. It's been tradition the last three years to feature the oldest, newest and a random card from my collection for each of the teams remaining in the postseason once the wild card has finished.     As in previous versions, several teams appear year after year, so I've already covered their oldest card in my collection. In those cases, I go to the second-oldest, third-oldest, etc.   RAYS VS. YANKEES   Tamp...