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Elusive '80s cards ... really? Part 5

    The main reason for starting this series other than having a post for the blog is to land some easily obtained cards of my team from that super-plentiful decade of the 1980s.   Hopefully, I half-thought, I could be done with collecting '80s cards forever.   Well, from the point I first started researching the first post of the series, I figured out that wasn't going to happen -- there were plenty of obscure and hard-to-find cards created in the '80s, and so many of them.    But I have been able to grab a few cards, even complete some team sets, thanks to this series. Often what happens is I nab a card or two while I'm writing the next post in the series ... and then I stall out. That's what happened with the last post in April .   I quickly grabbed the Pee Wee Reese 1987 Hygrade card to finish that team set, except for the variations that I'll probably never pursue.      And I nabbed the final card I needed for the 1987 TCMA 1955 Bro...
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It's my blog dammit

   One thing I still haven't been able to get into my head with this blog, even decades in, is that it's my blog.   You'd think I'd know that by now. I can post whatever the hell I want on here. I can post about happy little trees or rank rust-removal products or list my favorite Pure Prairie League songs. I can write about anything .   But instead I do dumb stuff like avoid showing individual cards that have come into my home recently because only 5 people might care. I make exceptions for cards that somebody has gifted or trade me or a large online order that I can wrap up into a theme, but the scatter-shot purchasing of a card here and there that I always do -- that we always do -- nah, that's not good enough.   I think that's because of my work job. As sports editor, and I've been doing this for a long time, my job is to find stories that are interesting and newsworthy to our readers. That sometimes bleeds over into my blog as I'm creating content he...

Competition in other places

  I did some light card organizing over the weekend. I moved my 1983 Kellogg's 3-D complete set from binder pages to top loaders, as it's one of the later sets that I'm confident won't crack when confined like that (unlike mid-'70s 3-D sets).   I also moved a small stack of 1981 and 1982 Topps stickers into leftover pages I had bought for early '50s Bowman cards. It took me forever to realize that the stickers would fit that size, too.   I have less than 20 stickers from the '81 set, so it fit into one page (pockets double-bagged). That's a good thing because my 1981 Topps binder is large and STUFFED.    There's a reason for that but just to illustrate how large the '81 binder is, here is a photo of the 1980 Topps and 1981 Topps binders -- both flagship sets complete -- side-by-side.   The 1980 binder is 44 pages (double-bagged, of course) and the 1981 binder -- maybe a little overstuffed is 71 pages -- 71!!!   Where does that compare among the l...

6,000

   This is the 6,000th post on Night Owl Cards. That really feels weird to type.   That is such a big number that I could barely find a corresponding baseball statistic to go along with it, which is what I like to do when I reach a round-number milestone on this blog.   I did find one -- career total bases. Just four players in major league history have reached 6,000 career total bases. Hank Aaron is the king of total bases with 6,856.   The others are Albert Pujols, Stan Musial and Willie Mays, in that order.   I couldn't find much more to say about that, so I dug out a favorite card of each player in my collection to go with the respective player's total base total.     1. HANK AARON, 6856 total bases   Naturally, I pulled out my 1956 copy. This is one of the '56 cards landed during the summer of 2020 that kind of let me know I could actually finish this thing.     2. ALBERT PUJOLS, 6211 total bases   This card amuses me beca...