Night Owl Cards

  I went to the big card show at the state fairgrounds for the first time in almost a year yesterday.   Since I had completed 1970 Topps about a month ago, I didn't have a specific major quest for this show. But I knew there would be a lot available so I made some vague goals:   1. Finish the 2024 Topps flagship set 2. Focus on the Fleer Laughlin World Series cards 3. Upgrade a handful of 1970 Topps cards 4. Find some 9-pocket pages and maybe a binder 5. Find some more oddballs   Here is the progress report after going to the show:   1. Finish the 2024 Topps flagship set ✓ 2. Focus on the Fleer Laughlin World Series cards 3. Upgrade a handful of 1970 Topps cards 4. Find some 9-pocket pages and maybe a binder ✓ 5. Find some more oddballs   Pretty happy with that, although that's just 40 percent success. The only reason I put down pages/binder as a goal is because I knew I didn't have any real expensive goals and maybe I could fit that in. But of course I like too many card

  I've run out of descriptors for the boxes Dave sends. Heck, even before you get to the contents, he sends it so it shows up on the porch just before The Storm Of A Generation hits. How? That's what happened last Thursday, before all the weather-fretting and "will we have power" concerns began -- like mere hours before that all began. But after the porch arrival, it was, "well, if the power goes out at least I have his big box of cards from Dave." Simply put, the box was flat-out impressive. Dodgers, yeah, there were Dodgers. Like '90s Dodgers Inserts Dodgers. Also included was that Mookie Betts Archives postcard insert that I instantly desired and then just as instantly received. Dave made sure that the desiring didn't turn into months of pining.     Heritage Dodgers. What's the highlight here? The Bellinger relic? The sparkly blue parallels that I didn't even know was a thing because I have a job and a family? Or how about that Kershaw fro

I don't do breakfast. I usually rouse myself out of my tree hole around 11 a.m. (although it's been a lot earlier lately for a variety of inconvenient reasons). By the time I'm ready for food, everyone else is at lunch. And because I consider lunch food infinitely more desirable than breakfast food, I simply slide into lunch with everyone else. Breakfast rarely exists in my world. This, no doubt, is heartbreaking news to whoever came up with the slogan, "breakfast is the most important meal of the day." They have no shot at shoving burnt toast and scalding coffee down my throat. The Eggo and Jimmy Dean people are powerless over me. I sound pretty smug about that, but I admit, this would be a tragedy if people were still putting baseball cards in and on cereal boxes. I'd have to eat cereal for lunch, I guess. Which would be quite the sacrifice because, boy, do I ever love sandwiches. Breakfast being the most important meal of the day would only mak

I don't know about you, but around here antique shows far outnumber card shows. In general, I have a faint appreciation for antiques. Old stuff is always interesting, except when you start getting into drapes or blankets and then it gets kind of creepy. And speaking of creepy, nobody wants your ancient clown dolls or oversized baby head paintings. But, for an hour or so, I can amuse myself with looking at old furniture or toys or wall hangings. Not that I'll buy any of it because it's far too expensive. It also falls under the heading of I DON'T HAVE ROOM FOR THIS STUFF, which is why I collect cards. I have a lot of cards, but probably, if I really, really tried, I could get them all into one small room in my house. If I collected antiques, a couple of shows would force me out of that small room. I usually don't bother with antique shows because the chances of cards being there are very slight. But, as you know, card shows have been disappearing at a rapid r

I haven't always been thrilled by miniature versions of baseball cards. Sure, the 1975 Topps minis were a first love that flourishes to this day. But there have been times when I thought I was getting cheated by smaller cards. The example that has stayed with me all these years has to do with Kellogg's 3-D cards of the 1970s and early 1980s. For a collector in the '70s, Kellogg's was the only real alternative to Topps, not that we thought of it in those terms. Kellogg's cards were simply cool, strangely weird cards that you could pull directly out of the box of cereal that sat on the kitchen table. No need to go to a store at all -- well, mom had to go to the store, I guess. Nobody had invented a way for cereal boxes to magically appear on the table yet. Our only hope for accessing non-Topps cards were through buying the right kind of cereal. It was a pain-staking process. Hostess cards were already out of the question, because "that kind of junk"