Night Owl Cards

    OK, now that I've established myself as an oddball in the current collecting landscape -- preferring vintage cards and all -- it's appropriate that I show off some recent "oddball" arrivals in my collection.   This runs the gamut and covers 85 years of trading cards and some of it isn't even cardboard.   Let's see:   Fired-up by my first acquisition of a 1960 Leaf high-number Dodger card in Rip Repulski, I decided to grab another one with this Joe Pignatano. It has a few minor flaws (it was listed as "good," which is usually "good enough" for me), but it still looks great.   That leaves just Stan Williams to complete the team set. Upon landing the Repulski, I received an email informing me that the Williams was available for a reasonable price on sportlots. But I didn't jump on it (I'm rarely financially ready to pounce on opportunities) and it's not there anymore.     Here's a card -- and an owlie greeting card -- that ...

(With the busy week ahead, I'm not sure how many posts I'll get in this week. Per usual I'll try my best. My goal every day is to post. Anyway, here's one now! Time for Cardboard Appreciation. This is the 359th in a series):    This card arrived in my collection yesterday. It's another box checked in the slow, slow quest for all of the Dodgers in the 1960 Leaf set.   This set doesn't get a lot of love. The photos are black and white. It's all portrait shots. It gets made fun of because Leaf packaged it with a marble instead of gum. But I have always liked it. I grew up on the late 1970s Renata Galasso/TCMA set that mimicked the 1960 Leaf design. I loved those TCMA cards. I thought the design was clean and satisfyingly old-school.   The first five Leaf Dodgers weren't tough to get, not even the Duke Snider. Black-and-white photos, you know.   The final three are another matter. Those who know this set are aware that the second half of the set (cards 73-14...

(Greetings readers. Today would have been my mom's 82nd birthday. I don't think it was too much to ask to have her reach 82 years, but we don't get to decide things like that. Time for something we can decide: whether or not to read about cards! This is the 316th in a series): This may or may not interest anyone, but I think it's fascinating, and, again, that's all that matters around here. While going through my last "One-Card Wonder" post , I came across this 1960 Leaf card of Stover McIlwain, or shall I say, the alleged Stover McIlwain.   McIlwain, a pitcher, managed just two appearances in the major leagues for the White Sox. He showed up in a mop-up role at the end of the season in 1957 as an 18-year-old. The following year, also at the end of the season, he got his first start against the Kansas City A's, in which he gave up a home run to Lou Klimchock. That marked the first time a teenager had homered off another teenager in MLB history. McIlwa...

  The last time I wrote one of these posts, back in March, I said I wanted to start digging into the 1990s to see if there were any One-Card Wonders. It seems impossible that such a player existed in the '90s -- managing to appear on just one major-release in their career -- but I had already found one , and I wanted to see if there were others.   But nothing is ever easy. Even for the player I found, he also appeared on an insert in Fleer that same year, and now I have to figure out whether an insert qualifies for appearing on a second major-release card? Thanks a lot, 1990s, for making things extra complicated ... again. This is what I discovered while searching through '90s cards looking for that One-Card Needle In The Hey That's Way Too Many Card Sets. I couldn't continue. It was much too time-consuming. I don't know if I'll ever go back. To get that out of my system, I went entirely in the other direction -- the 1950s. I haven't checked any '50s se...

So I've been doing this blogging thing for probably too long. Way back at the beginning, I made a trade with a collector in England. I couldn't get over how cool that was -- that someone, first of all, collected baseball cards in Europe, and second, that you could swap cards with someone who was that far away. Well, it's been years since that first transaction with Jack Plumstead and there have been several others since . And the thrill is no less diminished. In fact, since it's been a little while since John and I last exchanged cards, this latest deal may have been as exciting as the first. It strikes you right when you see the outside of the package, which is like no other package outer-covering that comes to my home. The words "documents enclosed," from a package mailed within the United States would either freak me out or send me into a state of depression. But not with something overseas. Overseas, "documents" means cards! Of course, ...

Baseball cards might be the most hostile environment for black-and-white images. We will fawn over black-and-white paintings, marvel at black-and-white photography framed on a wall, present awards to black-and-white movies, but don't you dare give us a baseball card set full of black-and-white players. Black-and-white photos do appear in sets these days, but it's always confined to a limited number of cards. Take this year's Stadium Club as an example. There are select black-and-white photos that collectors have oohed and aahed over, but the majority of the set is in color. That's the way it's been, for decades and decades. If you're going to do black-and-white, keep it to a limited number of cards, and for the love of cardboard, don't make the entire set black-and-white. One of those Stadium Club cards got me curious. How many black-and-white sets could I find since the days when full color photography made its entrance? I went through my Dodgers b...