Night Owl Cards

  I did some light card organizing over the weekend. I moved my 1983 Kellogg's 3-D complete set from binder pages to top loaders, as it's one of the later sets that I'm confident won't crack when confined like that (unlike mid-'70s 3-D sets).   I also moved a small stack of 1981 and 1982 Topps stickers into leftover pages I had bought for early '50s Bowman cards. It took me forever to realize that the stickers would fit that size, too.   I have less than 20 stickers from the '81 set, so it fit into one page (pockets double-bagged). That's a good thing because my 1981 Topps binder is large and STUFFED.    There's a reason for that but just to illustrate how large the '81 binder is, here is a photo of the 1980 Topps and 1981 Topps binders -- both flagship sets complete -- side-by-side.   The 1980 binder is 44 pages (double-bagged, of course) and the 1981 binder -- maybe a little overstuffed is 71 pages -- 71!!!   Where does that compare among the l...

  One of the big reasons that I'm still in this hobby -- and still blogging about it -- is that my life is fairly boring actually.   I do the same things day after day. Even the things I don't do day after day I've done before. It's a whole lot of mundane. Much like baseball, not a lot happens until some explosion of everything all at once. Only, unlike baseball, that chances of that "everything explosion" being good things is highly unlikely.   Trading cards are the excitement in my life. They are the guarantee that each day of my life will produce a little spark. If all those other daily things can't do it, cards will be there for me. Often that spark is a card that's new to my collection. Now, there's something that will make my eyes light up.   For example, this Freddie Freeman All-Star card that arrived recently. I received it with some other items from reader Grant, who is one of those folks nice enough to comment here (try it, it's fun!...

Like most folks in this country, I am not made of money. While going for my daily walks or driving around town, I look at the shiny gargantuans passing for cars on the local road and wonder who can afford that. There are so many of them now, maybe there actually are people made of money?   But little guys like me -- who drive a modest CRV -- must pick our moments for spending cash. Budgets and all that. And, while I've never been a bargain-hunter in everyday life, I sometimes am as a card collector.  Freebies are still a thing in the collecting social media world, though not as often as they once were. I need to do my part in that area -- it's not due to a lack of cards, just a lack of time. But at least I'm participating in the claiming!   Here are some very recent acquisitions, all in response to "free" or "free with a catch" come-ons.     Jim of cards as I see them revived his "Almost Free Fridays" giveaway recently. I was only able to find...

It really is interesting to see the extreme reactions to starting up professional sports amid the covid outbreak. As usual, I'm somewhere in the middle, constantly shaking my head at one side or the other. The most recent news to freak out over (or at least last I checked) is a number of Marlins testing positive for the coronavirus. As if we didn't know this was going to happen. What are we going to do now? What will the schedule look like? Will we ever play again? Should we play again? Should we have started playing again? Who are the Marlins anyway? Perhaps you've heard, I'm not a fan of speculation, especially in a situation that no one has encountered before. There are far too many "experts" blathering into the air, who know only what their emotions tell them. I'll politely watch from the sidelines and adjust accordingly. The truth is, baseball's restart plan is indeed ambitious, considering there is travel involved. It's also true t...