Night Owl Cards

  The most recent Beckett Vintage Collector arrived in my mailbox Monday and with it my latest article for the magazine.   It's the 20th article I've written for the magazine as I'm coming up on six years since first joining the writing roster there. But it's also been a year since I've had a story published, mostly due to 1) Far less time to devote to magazine writing, thanks to my "real job" and 2) Plain running low on ideas.   But I'm glad I had enough to get me to 20. I'm fairly happy with the subject of this article. It's certainly something I can relate to considering my profession. It's about the many examples of name errors on sports cards.   I know the struggle well -- we publish sports names almost every day at my job. But it still was surprising how many name errors I came across while researching for this story (and how many more emerged once I announced my story had published).   I quickly realized I would not be able to includ...

  I'm sure you can feel it coming, it's never actually left. Football is here. And it's trying to push baseball out of the way.   This is how it's been for decades -- once training camps start for the NFL I begin to feel that seasonal dread of summer winding down, sports I care less about or don't care about at all ramping up, and, worst of all, my job -- and life -- getting busier.   Actual NFL games don't begin until September, so the true baseball-football overlap is September and October, but tell that to the sports wire, in which the football stories have already outnumbered the baseball stories.   But instead of fighting it, I'll lean into it for at least this post. Just the other day I received a handful of cards from Bo of Baseball Cards Come to Life! He was giving out cards to celebrate a new job! (Hey, I need to do a big one of those when I finally retire!). I picked four of them.    Two baseball and two football. As I mentioned on another social...

(Greetings on National Chocolate Chip Cookie Day. There are no chocolate chip cookies in the house, nor do I see one for me on the horizon today -- certainly not buying the package in the downstairs vending machine at work. I shall distract myself with Cardboard Appreciation. This is the 355th in a series):   Continuing my recent trend toward devoting Cardboard Appreciation to oddball sets , here's another item -- that I didn't know existed until last week.   I mentioned a few posts ago that I was asked to assess a collection that was given to a church thrift shop. The collection was once owned by a boy who is now 25 and includes mostly cards from the early 2000s to the mid 2010s.   I also mentioned that the co-worker who asked me to look it over gave me permission to pick out some cards for my own collection. I added a handful -- no more than 15. A lot of it was familiar stuff that I either already own, don't like much or don't collect (football and basketball mostly)....

  It's the summer traveling season. We're visiting or greeting visitors, yet the cards keep coming. It's sometimes difficult to focus. What do I write about -- this or this ?   But I've finally settled on a couple of player collections, a rare off-shoot of my main collecting goals. I think they're impressive in their own way.   I just added the Topps Now card for Clayton Kershaw's 3,000th strikeout. I just had to get the card and didn't pay all that much for it. These cards are almost nothing to look at, I don't like them any more than I did when Topps Now first became a thing. Just think if Topps created an interesting design for these, it might have all my money.   But that's just the lead-in card for this post. One of my player collecting projects is to get all of Kershaw's flagship gold cards. I wrote about finishing the run through 2022 a couple of years ago. And I finally decided to get back on that project. So recently, three more cards ha...