Night Owl Cards

  When you get to be my age time travels faster than ever. I think I've finally figured out that the reason older people talk about this so often is not to make idle chit-chat but because it's so staggering that you can't help but talk about it. It's shocking. I know almost a day doesn't pass without me thinking about how fast the days, months, years move.   I suppose this topic is especially appropriate today as we just moved the clocks ahead an hour last night. It's annually one of my least favorite days of the year and I'm writing this in a half-stupor thanks to that time change.   It's about the last thing I want to do at 60 years old -- speed things up. And here we are charging ever faster toward the start of the Major League Baseball season, which according to my research is starting earlier than at any point since I became a baseball fan.   This is discounting the recent super-early, one-off games or series in a foreign country that MLB likes to d...

  It's Easter weekend and one of my favorite parts of the holiday -- now that I'm required to limit my chocolate intake and nobody is buying me baseball card packs to put in my basket -- is all of the color.   I live where it's cold and gray just about six months out of the year and everyone's idea of fashion is to dress like a vampire. So I'm pretty desperate for something colorful by the time April hits. I also grew up in the '70s and '80s when people were not ashamed of color. For example, cards were always colorful, not something reserved for a parallel.   One of the best examples of that is my beloved 1975 Topps set. And one of the best spin-offs of that set is my beloved 1980 Baseball Immortals set.   I opined about the Baseball Immortals set a little over a year ago when I acquired cards 1-189 from it all in one shot. What a great day that was.   But I was still missing 10 cards from the set. Those were the ones added as other players were inducted i...

  My favorite part of collecting cards doesn't have to do with collecting current players, rookie cards or prospecting.   Although I pay attention to and buy modern cards and also seek out cards from before I was collecting or even before I was born, none of those cards are why I'm doing this.   The best part of collecting for me -- where the warm fuzzies reside, what I'd save for myself after chucking the rest of my collection -- is any card that was released when I was a child or young teen. I don't think I'm special in that way. A lot of collectors probably feel that way. But, unlike, say, the adult who grew up during the junk wax era, who can open pack after pack of 1990 Donruss and get that nostalgic rush without fear of packs ever disappearing, it's a little more difficult for me. I can go to a discount store a couple of miles away in town and grab some 1988 Donruss packs (I think I can still do that, who knows with the hobby weirdness lately). But there...

This post was originally going to be called "stuff I discovered on the internet," but I figured that would leave too much to the imagination. Before the internet came along, I discovered cards and card sets mostly through advertisements in the Sporting News or Baseball Digest, or through hobby catalogs that came to my house, like TCMA or Fritsch Cards. Later, I subscribed to Baseball Cards Magazine and found new-to-me sets in articles in that magazine. But I missed so much through those methods. Outside of what was selling in wax or cello packs at the drug or grocery store, that was all I knew. It wasn't until years and years later, when I ended up online like everyone else, that I discovered how much that I had missed. Once I became aware of card blogs, the door was open wider than ever. There were so many sets -- so many sets and cards that often had been issued right under my nose -- that I never knew existed. For example: I had no idea there were so many box sets fro...

I've been picking off 1977 Kellogg's cards fairly easily and quickly the last few weeks. Unless I hit some sort of short-printed snag that I don't know about, I should have the set finished in a couple of months. That kind of timeline is fairly standard in our access-friendly world. In fact, there are a few people reading this right now who wonder why I didn't just buy the whole thing at once. This is how spoiled we've become. Twenty-five years ago how could I have accomplished this? Where could I have found 1977 Kellogg's cards -- 20-year-old oddballs -- for sale? I couldn't even tell you, probably because I wasn't collecting then. But even so, it couldn't have been as easy as it is now. I know when I was pulling Kellogg's cards out of the cereal box back in the '70s, the only way you could obtain the entire set is to order them off the side of the box. It was either that or buy a mountain of cereal and hope you don't pull out a...

Here are the rest of the cards that I bought with some magazine-writing money. They're not as exciting as the 1977 Renata Galasso cards that were the stars of this purchase. But they mean quite a bit to me, so let's get to it. The most notable thing about this group of purchases is that I used COMC, ebay and Sportlots together for the first time. I think I'm at the stage in my collection where I need to consult all three, mostly for inventory, but also for prices. The majority of my money went to ebay. COMC and Sportlots got the leftovers. You're going to see the COMC leftovers first. I bought just three 2019 cards. Two of them were Revolution of the Game inserts from flagship. These were maddening in their unavailability when I opened packs. I didn't buy a lot of 2019 Topps, but I did get enough where I think I should have seen at least one of every insert. Unfortunately, Topps now creates eleventy billion inserts so I guess I shouldn't be anno...