Night Owl Cards

  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...

  The 2024 Topps Holiday design appealed to me right away. I've enjoyed most over-the-top designs -- as long as they have a fun streak -- and these cards have that. It was the first Holiday set I found appealing since 2019, when I went a little nuts and completed the whole thing that holiday season. Since that year, the designs were pretty blah and I started to think Topps should hang it up with this set. So good for Topps going splashy this year ... er, last year. Yeah, why am I writing about this now? The holidays are long gone, replaced by ... crap is that another lake-effect storm? Well, I'm just staying in the spirit of the current situation. In case you haven't noticed the last four or five years, everything is late. Almost nobody shows up at work on time anymore in my experience, packages are constantly delayed, work orders delayed, events pushed back. Topps is just as late as everything else. Archives is just coming out now. Stadium Club was way late again. Allen ...

  I keep forgetting to acknowledge TCDB and their members for voting my blog as "Favorite Blog" again this year. This makes it five years in a row and six out of the past seven. "Favorite blog" seems like an outdated award even to me -- sounds something like "favorite cassette tape" -- but it shows that people are still reading and still enjoying and it's nice to have that reminder. Or maybe it's like the Gold Glove award and people vote purely on reputation.   There is the medal table, except I get a crown. Now on to the honor that more people care about -- and they really do care about it. The Baseball Hall of Fame announced the baseball writers' selections for this year's Hall of Fame class. Three players are going in -- Ichiro, CC Sabathia and Billy Wagner -- joining the earlier committee picks of Dave Parker and Dick Allen. This means I need to update the Most Hall of Famers tally, which I'll get to when the 2025 class is inducted....