Night Owl Cards

  Last Friday, the baseball socials and various "topical" sports websites were abuzz about MLB's shrinking ballplayers.   Since MLB is implementing the ABS (Automated Balls/Strikes System) this season, the league remeasured players to get more exact figures to feed into the computer. That resulted in a lot of players' official heights changing.   Gavin Lux sort of became the unofficial representative of the change in ballplayers' heights. Lux went from 6-foot-2 to 5-foot-11. I admit, I don't notice players' heights much but if someone told me when Lux was on the Dodgers that he was 6-2, I would have laughed. Not what my eyes were telling me when watching him in a game.   This info is all well and good but naturally I wanted to know how this played out on baseball cards. Did the vital stats on the backs change from 2025 to 2026? Immediately, the answer was "yes." Lux does not have a 2026 Topps flagship card yet, but he does have a Heritage card (o...

  Well, actually it does. There are a lot of cards I will never downsize.   But what I am referring to is card brands. More on that in a minute.   My series of downsizing posts have paid off for my overall goal of clearing space on my card shelves, but it's a very slow process.   First of all, any movement on this project is restricted to the weekend. I don't have the time or energy for this during the week. Secondly, I probably should be giving away cards in much larger chunks for quicker progress. But I can't afford that. So piece meal it is.   The process, like I've said, is removing cards from binders and putting them into boxes. I clear space in boxes through these giveaways. Some examples of progress since the first downsize back in November:   Complete Allen & Ginter sets post-2011 are now in boxes. The double-row long box here houses 2012, 2013 and 2014 complete sets. There is another box elsewhere that contains all of my A&G cards from 2015...

  As a young baseball fan in the late 1970s, I really wanted the Baseball Encyclopedia.   The one I saw in advertisements in every baseball publication, The Sporting News, Baseball Digest, etc., had been just released in 1977 and it really drew my attention.   I eventually bought the softcover version of the Hy Turkin Baseball Encyclopedia from an ad in Baseball Digest. I don't remember how much it cost but it was a lot for me at the time, maybe $12.99 or something? When it arrived, I took it everywhere. I distinctly remember taking it across the street onto the porch of our lifelong friends, two girls who didn't care a wit about baseball, and just pouring over the details right there on the porch.   The thrill for me was having every player's record, every team's record right there for reference. I never had to wonder about this stat or that, I could pull it off the bookshelf built into my bed and read it right there in bed. And I did. Many times.   I don't kno...

   I watched a half-a-box break of 2026 Topps Heritage last night. Yikes.   I was really glad afterward that I had already made the decision not to chase the set, as I had for 2023, 2024 and 2025 Heritage. It does not look great. Even the replication of the design -- which is not difficult for 1977 Topps -- is not good, which was mostly all I had to keep me dedicated to Heritage the last couple of years.   A lot of the photos do not represent 1977 photography and there were those ridiculous blue-sparkle parallels in every third pack and chromes in the rest of them (I also hear the collation is not good). This set is so far away from what it has been and what I was counting on it to be once Heritage reached the mid-1970s set. Very disappointing.   So I'm not building any modern sets for the first time in a few years and don't have any large vintage chases either. This is the perfect window to gather those random Dodgers needs, and so with that in mind ...  ...