Night Owl Cards

   I skipped the monthly card show today because we did get about five inches of snow last night and then the temperature promptly dropped below zero. So to get to the show I'd have to bundle up, clear off the car, shovel out the driveway, all in sub-zero conditions. It just didn't seem worth it.   The monthly show has made me soft. I used to risk driving an hour through lake-effect to get to a show when there was just 2 or 3 a year!   So, sorry, I will have no show wares to show off this time. But maybe someone will like what I have instead:   FREE CARDS!   Yes, I'm still downsizing. This is the third edition of attempting to rid cards from my house in hopes that someone else can use them. To recap, I'm trying to clear some room for cards that I want and shelving space to house those cards. That means scrapping cards that have long sat in boxes and a lot of it stuff that doesn't fit my style.   There are around 500 cards this time around.   Like ...

(I am preparing to have my dinner at the office again tonight after yet another prediction of a late afternoon/early evening snowstorm. This is convenient for 9-5 workers, who can close up shop early, but definitely not for me. Let's see if I can get out of the work parking lot late tonight. Time for Cardboard Appreciation. This is the 363rd in a series):   My collecting during the junk wax era was sporadic. I've written many times that I didn't collect between 1986-88 (save for one pack of Topps I bought in '88). I collected Topps like crazy in 1989, then went cold turkey again in 1990. I came back somewhere in 1991 collecting casually and then bought a bunch in '92 and '93.   I can see good and bad points to this. The good: I have no fond memories for mediocre sets like 1990 Donruss or overvalue 1989 Upper Deck. The bad: I missed several players commonly known by junk wax devotees, who were kids at the time and memorized the front and back of every card.   For...

  In my continuing quest to plug the gaps as far as any baseball card set issued during my youth, I recently landed the 1980 Burger King Pitch, Hit & Run set.   Like the Burger King team sets of the late 1970s/1980, this set's design was produced by Topps and used the flagship design from the year of issue. As a youngster, I was well-aware of the Burger King team sets, but I don't recall knowing about the Pitch, Hit & Run set. It's possible that I had outgrown the advertising used for this set (I was 14) and it passed me by. I know I was too old to participate in Pitch, Hit & Run activities.   Still, this was a huge oversight on my part, this set is 100% filled with the players from my youth and it also features one of my all-time favorite aspects of cards from this time -- updates and variations -- spin-offs from the flagship set, whether related to changing teams or for no good reason at all.   My favorite aspect of sets like O-Pee-Chee is alterations f...