Night Owl Cards

It occurred to me the other day that I have been accumulating baseball cards for 40 years. That's not an approximation. The first time I ever held trading cards in my hands that were my very own happened in 1974. That's exactly 40 years ago. I don't know at what point in the year I pulled that Tommy John card out of a cello pack of '74 Topps purchased by mother. I would imagine it would have been in the spring. So this is the perfect time to celebrate my 40th anniversary of collecting cards. With the exception of 1996 and 1999 -- the darkest years of my collecting dark period of 1995-2005 -- I have obtained cards every one of those 40 years. Collecting has been part of me since I was a little boy. But that little boy of 9 years old would be a bit surprised with what I have become. Back when I was a kid, the only card collecting objectives were to obtain pictures of baseball players. In the ensuing years, that expanded into football, hockey and even basketball

I've been doing this long enough to know that the average trade post doesn't interest the masses. I've also been doing this long enough to know that I like a clean desk. I have zero room for any additional card packages and when that happens, I have to clear things out. Comments be damned. So settle down and load up for a combined trade post. Bring your finest meats and cheeses and a bottle of ale. You're going to see some cool cards from a variety of people. Behold: Here are some cards from reader Joe. What would you say at this time last year if I told you that Dee Gordon might be the most productive position player on the Dodgers? You would laugh derisively. It would be ugly. There would be insults back and forth. And we would not be on speaking terms. That's why I'm waiting until now to tell you this. I was going to mention Kemp's slow start, but right now all that comes to mind about Kemp is the weird conversations that billion

Other than being a consumer, I'm not qualified to give advice to a card company. And my dismissal of Panini baseball card products is well-established, so I'm not exactly objective either. I know some collectors embrace Panini products because Panini is the closest thing to competition for Topps. Anything other than Topps is OK with them, I suppose. Or maybe they're just so happy to see another option that they open their arms to what I view as an inferior product. I just know that when I saw a couple of collectors on Twitter recently exclaim what a steal a $20 box of 2013 Panini Prizm was, I was thinking, "I might buy that for a dollar." I just haven't been impressed. The only exception is the 2013 Hometown Heroes set. I received two more Dodgers that I needed from that set from The Junior Junkie . You saw Clayton Kershaw up at the top (come back soon, dude), and here is Billy Buck: Hometown Heroes is the only Panini baseball product that does n

This is the start of a new series. Unlike some of the others, I think this one is here to stay. There is minimal work involved and virtually no thinking. Just pull and scan the cards. Actually, this series came about because I've begun work on another series -- the top 100 cards of the 1970s. I've finally started pulling some cards for that. But I'm still a long, long way from beginning the countdown show. Here, all I'm going to do is display a complete team set. It has to be a set that I own. I'll pick whatever team set interests me and then show all the cards. I'll start it off with perhaps the greatest team set of all-time, the 1974 Topps Oakland A's. Here it is in all of its gaudy glory: I'm leaving out cards like the 4-player rookie cards (sorry Glenn Abbott and Manny Trillo) and postseason cards to preserve continuity. In other words, they'll mess up the color theme. And now for the rundown: Favorite card runners

The older the night card, the better it gets. The more oddball the night card, the better it gets. So what we have here is the best kind of night card. An old oddball night card. I have a few oddball night cards, but I don't think I have an oddball night card this old. It arrived from Kevin of Orioles Card "O" the Day . I like this card not only because it's a Post card from 1961 that you had to cut off of a box, and not only because the glowing bank of lights appear to be burning the backside of Billy Klaus' head, but because of the last sentence on the card. "During the off-season he works in a bowling alley." That is fantastic. Can you imagine walking into a bowling alley, going up to the counter, telling the man that you wear a size 11 and then J.J. Hardy goes and gets them for you? What a wonderful world that must have been. Klaus was no slouch. Sure, by this point he was a part-time player and on his way to the Senators for the 1961