Night Owl Cards

  There are a lot of baseball card poses that were common on cards when I was collecting as a youngster that have mostly disappeared from cardboard.   One of them is the pitcher's "hands-over-head" wind-up pose. This pose used to appear on dozens of cards every year but it's been a long time since I've seen it in a current set. Maybe a one-off here and there.   Pitchers mostly have scrapped the long, drawn-out wind-up and did so beginning with the 1970s, or so I'm told. But I just reviewed a small sampling of game footage from the 1970s and here are the pitchers that were using that wind-up in the videos I watched:   Bruce Kison, Jerry Garvin, Steve Baker, Vida Blue, Jerry Koosman, Rudy May, Andy Hassler, Bob Knepper, Don Sutton, Dickie Noles, Jim Bibby, Eddie Solomon, Jim Rooker, Mike Cuellar, Don Robinson.   Here are the ones who weren't:   J.R. Richard, Jim Merritt, Steve Rogers.   So it was still prevalent in the 1970s.   Today it's still used...

  Yesterday I attended the big show at the state fairgrounds that goes off twice a year. The last time I was there was in September and I obtained the majority of cards from three dealers who are almost always there and almost always get the majority of my business.   I was so confident that they would be there this time that I didn't bother to update my blog want lists or to finally figure out how to access my TCDB want lists on my phone. I just took my hand-penned want list for 1969 Topps and 1979 Topps football and stuffed them in my pocket. If two of those dealers were there, then that would be sufficient.   Well, neither of the two were there. This was a crisis because they are there so often I automatically thought something was wrong. Then I realized just about all my vintage options were gone. The crumpled list in my pocket was useless.   It was time to regroup, though after I did, I walked the show with a lot more uneasiness than I usually do. Not only were...

  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...

 Have you voted in the latest round of Cardboard Appreciation, the review (part 5)? To select which card from this week's group should advance, cast your vote in the comments or copy-and-paste to vote in the poll with this link: https://vote.easypolls.net/62ab88285617e80062b60897   If you search around enough on my blog, you'll find a post or two or three of me saying I don't care much for sets from the early 1960s. I didn't -- for a long time. Nothing from that time period spoke to me. Unlike a few '50s sets that snuck in and connected despite me not being around to collect them originally, those '60s sets, I couldn't be bothered with them. Photos too boring, designs too plain and not much of clue about who was on the card. But things are turning around a little bit. I'm not trying to complete the sets or anything. But something in me decided it's right to have at least a small sampling of cards from this time, like I do for, say, 1957 or 1968. The...

  I mentioned the other day that I bought a couple of cards with the cash that I received from my latest Beckett Vintage article. You saw the Campanella MVP card a few posts ago .   The other one was the 1960 Topps Tommy Davis card, and with that card, I have completed the 1960s Topps run of Dodgers cards.   No, I don't have the Ken McMullen rookie, or the Doug Camilli rookie. But those floating heads cards carry unreasonable prices because of the heads floating around with them (Rose, Uecker) and chances are good I will never own them. Even if I had the cash, it seems silly to buy a card for that price that looks like that.   So, except for those, I own all the Topps flagship Dodgers from the '60s.   It wasn't easy and it's taken decades. There were obstacles I never expected, like the price of the Bart Shirley-Grant Jackson card. I also had to overcome quite a bit of indifference early on, as I was just a wee-one during the back half of the '60s and most of th...