Night Owl Cards

I completed another set. I know nobody seems to care about that lately (apparently, if my experience Monday is accurate. every human being is out back-to-school shopping and not blog-readin'). But it's still exciting stuff to me and I'll continue to post about it until even the crickets go silent.   This one is the team set for 2004 Upper Deck Timeless Teams. This is one of the more attractive retro sets of this time period and Upper Deck liked it so much that the theme returned in its Timeline set a mere four years later. These were the last two Dodgers cards I needed to finish it: There are a whopping 39 cards in this team set and that's not even including the Memorable Moments cards, which are also part of the base set but look nothing like the rest of the cards. The Timeless Teams set is not  equal opportunity  focusing solely on the best teams of the '60s, '70s, '80s and '90s. So while the Dodgers have 39 cards and the Yankees also have 39, the Astr

I don't know whether it's because I watched the Yankees lose last night or that I recently landed a couple of Yankees cards that finished off some sets, but I'm in a cheerful New York state of mind with this post. This very unnatural-looking card of The Mick, fresh off of my Nebulous 9 list, finally, at long last, completed the Mantle insert set from 2006 Topps. As regular readers may know, I have been attempting to complete as many things as I can from the 2006 Topps set as that's what vaulted me back into the modern part of the hobby. I don't normally try to finish insert sets randomly, but that's what I've been trying to do with '06. It's more of a half-hearted attempted 15 years later, but I can say I wrapped up one in 2021! Mantle is all over 2006 with a card for every home run he hit running rampant at this time. But the Mantle insert set is a tidy 10 cards (OK, OK, 10-card insert sets are actually infuriating). Each card featured Mantle on one

Last week I finished off an article about my Dodgers collection for the main Beckett Baseball magazine. I'm really not up on the main magazine -- the Vintage Collector magazine is more my speed -- but I believe Beckett Baseball has a regular series where they take a look at contributing writers' collections. I hope I'm not putting words in anyone else's mouth who has written a story like that for Beckett, but that's the easiest article in the world to write. The only problem for me was not prattling on for pages and pages. I was limited to a 1,000 words, but initially what I wrote was three times that (and could've been 10 times that). Fortunately, I edit for a living, so I cut it down to a tidy 995 relatively easily, even though I was writing about my babies. The surprising thing for me is that a lot of what was left in the article was about Ron Cey. I like to think I'm an equal-opportunity collector when it comes to the Dodgers -- sure, Ismael Valdez, I

Yesterday, either just before or after the Dodgers' sweep of the Padres, I reveled in knowing that nobody remembers, or rather nobody wants to bring up, that the Padres were crowned MLB's "it" team during the offseason and into the current season. I really miss objective baseball writers, because it becomes obvious that a lot of national online writers have no qualms about rooting for certain teams, mostly because they have young stars. The Padres, per usual, are now on a path to nowhere, but as I was reflecting, I started to wonder whether I got caught up in the Padres Hype Train, too (no, no, don't worry, it's not like I wanted them to win). Didn't I say that this might be the year they put all the mediocrity aside during my annual "30 Teams" post?   I scrambled to look up the most recent 30 Teams post from this past February/March and ... didn't find one.   What the heck? Did I not write my traditional post that's been taking place th