Night Owl Cards

  I got a card envelope from Japan last week.   I've received card envelopes from all over the world -- England, Australia, France, the Netherlands, probably places I'm forgetting -- but it hasn't happened for a good while. So it's very cool when the return address says "Tokyo".   It was sent by Zippy Zappy, of Torren' Up Cards . As you might know, he now lives in Japan. He used to live in the same state I did, now he's real far away. But the cards are still coming.   He sent me my first Roki Sasaki card, the card you see here. It's from the 2021 BBM set, I'm assuming "Cross Torrent" is some sort of insert? Sasaki's Japanese rookie cards appear to be from 2020, this card came out in his first year in the Japan Pacific League. He pitched for the Chiba Lotte Marines for five years before coming to the Dodgers. He's been a regular starter for really just the last three years, and his thing is he strikes batters out a lot . This c...

  I had viewed enough 2024 Archives pack openings to know I needed to open some myself. Not that I liked the cards -- Archives and I have never seen eye-to-eye -- but I wanted to see the content for myself so I could comment on it on my own blog instead leaving irked comments all over everyone else's pack breaks. Also, there was one aspect of 2024 Archives that folks kept bringing up, but actually there is nothing wrong with that aspect ... well, in the general Archives realm anyway. But I'll get to that. First let's open those three packs. (By the way, these came from Walmart on Thursday -- a place that has barely offered cards for the last couple of years, but in a constant give-and-take with the Target across the street, Target is now devoid of cards. It's odd how neither can be decently stocked at the same time).   PACK 1   I have been opening Archives since its current version began in 2012, I know what to expect -- three past designs, totally unrelated. This year...

  I am about the only card blogger that I can think of who has multiple blog posts dedicated to old-school checklists. All those posts were generated by nostalgia, pure and simple. I cannot reasonably expect those checklists to return to current sets nor pretend that I enjoyed pulling them out of packs way back then. But the look of them -- the very '70s look of them -- I do enjoy and they make me smile, as ugly as they are.   I can respect them for the purpose that they served at the time -- it was the only way to track your collection. The checklists in current flagship show up on the back of random action/celebration shots. Those cards have no purpose -- front or back -- and need to go. If you're going to placate a few old-school collectors by including checklist boxes on the back, make the fronts themed, something like notable highlights from the past year seems easy enough.   Anyway, due to the current treatment of checklists and recognizing that nobody needs to be p...

  Since the start of the year I have been trying to focus on two of my "if it happens, it happens" resolutions. Those two things are to read more books and work on improving my sleep. I work a night job. I often don't get done with work until midnight or 1, 2 in the morning. This is tough on sleep because, as you know, you need to unwind after a work shift -- or at least most people do. For day-shifters, that's easy, they unwind in the evening time, lots of hours before bed. But for me, my unwind time is confined to a couple hours late at night. I've often spent it online, wandering the card blogs or watching videos or just reading stuff. But staring at backlit screens before bed isn't good for sleep. So to hit both resolutions at once, an hour before turning in, I shut off my devices and read a book. It's worked pretty well so far (when the cat isn't acting up) and my sleep improved almost instantly. The first book I'm reading (I have a whole shel...

  A couple of different things I've read or observed lately, on top of currently collecting the 1979 Topps football set made me compare '79 Topps football and '79 Topps baseball in my head. The main thought was: "why do I like '79 football so much and am so blah about '79 baseball?"   There are a few reasons I can come up with off the top of my head:   1. I was immediately unimpressed with 1979 baseball when I bought my first packs. It was my fifth year of buying baseball cards and I was also a brand-new teenager. I was ready to criticize the status quo. I do like '79 Topps, but I can see its issues pretty clearly and saw them then.   2. 1979 football is just the second year I bought packs of football cards (1977 was the first). You tend to have affection for the first couple of years of buying cards. Unlike the fifth year.   3. 1979 football is heavy on colorful design elements, while the '79 baseball set is relatively reserved for a '70s set....

  Let's just stay with the out-of-season Christmas posts here. Why not? Nobody's celebrating late January. As many of you know, Rod of Padrographs is a great guy who opens up a bunch of current product around the holidays and then distributes a lot of it to his favorite bloggers. I'm one of those! Most of the cards he sent this time were Dodgers or Orioles. The Baltimores are for my nephew, but he's in college now, when card interest is way low, so they'll stay with me or maybe be sent to another Orioles collector. He also sent three unopened packs: All of these have since been opened. I'll show off the contents at the end of the post. But I need to get on with the Dodgers because, brother, did Rod boost my 2024 content in that area.   Here is where most of the Holiday team set came from -- before I opened that Holiday dome in the previous post. One of the cards is a silver glitter parallel for Yamamoto. Rod took care of just about all of my Stadium Club team n...