Night Owl Cards

  I've hassled Donruss pretty good over the life of this blog, slagging them for childish '80s designs, repetitive card backs with just five years of stats, and burying every man, woman and child in sets from the late 1980s. But there is one element of those old Donruss days that no card company can match. Not Fleer, not Upper Deck and certainly not Topps. Through one, small gesture, Donruss endeared itself to a generation of collectors and still does to this day, if I am any example. See if you can tell what it is. It's right here on this card:   It's on this one, too:   And on this one: Surely you have figured it by now ...   DONRUSS PUT THE YEAR THE SET WAS ISSUED ON THE FRONT OF THE CARD! Right there on the front. Where every collector could see it instantly. No questions, no wondering, no confusion, it's right with the logo. 1984!! This set was issued in 19-EIGHTY- FOUR! I've never been more confident about a card fact in my life. You would think this wo

Waiting is even more of a part of life than it used to be, which doesn't seem possible considering how much waiting I did pre-pandemic, but yet there is sooo much moooore waiting. A lot of it I can understand, even if it doesn't make me happy and I'm plain disgusted about it some of the time. Then there is just the dumb kind of waiting. For example, this: I waited almost an entire year to get this card, but it's not because there were no Heritage cards on store shelves or I was pulling nothing but Marlins and Twins. Walker Buehler should have been in the regular Heritage set, issued last March. He's a regular part of the rotation, was a regular part of the rotation in 2020. There's no reason to skip him. Yet Topps put Buehler in Heritage High Numbers, like it did for several notable players who did not change teams and should've been in the main portion of the set (Buster Posey, Manny Machado, Stephen Strasburg, Rafael Devers). I've read that Topps did t

  I've been watching with interest the reader numbers drop with each subsequent edition of the "best on-card element" series. Part of this is typical, the longer a series lasts, the less interested people get -- at least for those who aren't really into the series. But also I think this demonstrates how much readers are interested in vintage -- at least my readers anyway -- since the first three editions of the series covered the '50s, '60s and '70s. But it's difficult to make all of my posts, or even the majority of my posts, about vintage cards. First, my interests go beyond vintage, even though vintage cards have my heart. Second, there are only so many vintage cards to go around -- there are simply fewer vintage cards, at least accessible vintage cards, than the gobs and gobs of cards manufacturers made from the late 1980s until now. Third, vintage cards are usually more expensive, some significantly so. I wish I had the money to show them more. I