Night Owl Cards

  Here you go, 2021 card collectors and companies, your cautionary year.   By 1994, card sets readily available to collectors had eclipsed 30 different kinds with various off-shoots and variations, demonstrating the company tricks that are still employed today. Collecting was no longer about the base set in '94 as "the chase" had become the thing and inserts and parallels exploded in content and popularity that year.   The hobby never seemed healthier or more vibrant. Then the baseball strike hit.   Fans left the game in droves and collectors walked away, partly due to the strike but also because the new direction of the hobby -- way too many sets to pursue -- didn't make sense to those used to the old way of collecting.   I was one of those who left in 1994. I collected some Topps, a few packs. That was it. By '96, I couldn't tell you a single thing that was happening in the hobby.   Those who remained, primarily kids who were just starting out in collecti...

Not sure how much I'll be posting here in the next few days. Posting is already sporadic and it's about to get super-radic, if you know what I mean. If you do see regular posting know that I'm exerting myself far beyond what I usually do to get something on here. The only thing there's time for today is opening a pack. No thought, just cards. I had planned to save this for A Pack To Be Named Later , but desperate times, man. Besides, Series 1 and Series 3 of '94 Stadium Club have already been opened there. I don't want to be too repetitive. This is one of the dollar packs acquired at the card show in Vermont. 1994 Stadium Club is a weird bird. Much like everything in '94, Stadium Club was trying to get younger. Trendy. What the kids like. So it overhauled its three-year look, added some edgy graphics, slapped "extreme" and "premium" on everything, and hoped that kids would buy baseball cards -- in the middle of a baseball strike....

The number of colored parallels reached a new high (or low) in 2014. Just in Topps retail alone there was Target red, Walmart blue, Toys R Us purple, hanger pack green, hanger box yellow, hanger box orange, any-kind-of-pack red foil, and good-luck-finding-any pink, black and camo. It's really gotten out of hand and I'm not the only one to have said this fifty eleven times. But I'll say one thing for all the parallels: at least cards are colorful again. There was The Dark Period -- some call it the 1990s -- when cards weren't all that colorful (Finest and Circa were exceptions). Oh sure, the pictures were full-bleed and the photographs were as clear as all get-out, but I grew up in a land of colorful photography. I need more than a picture. I need crazy multi-color borders. I need electric graphics. Some '90s sets tried to entice collectors with over-the-top names that implied glorious color. One of those deceivers is the 1994 Stadium Club parallels. They we...

Reporters notice certain ballplayers immediately. They are the players who are friendly, personable and always available. They are often articulate and can be counted on for a quote in good times and bad. I have been lucky enough to find several players like that during my journalism career, in pro baseball and otherwise. Sean Casey was one of those players. And so was John Doherty . These are the players that end up with jobs in the broadcasting industry. You see them on Baseball Tonight or some similar gig. Curtis Granderson is destined for that kind of role. I figured the same for John Doherty. But he went in a different direction after his major league baseball career ended. Doherty's career lasted just four years. He had a solid 1993 season with the Tigers, but was finished after three games with the Red Sox in 1996. I came across him during his first year in professional baseball, with the Tigers' Single A team in Niagara Falls. Doherty was the closer for that team in 1...

Telling you this story means that I have to confess to violating the rules of my own post . But I'm running low on material right now. And confession is good for the blog. Or something like that. So here I go. First, I'm going to jump ahead and say, what the holy hell was Stadium Club thinking when they issued this card? Were they trying to kill me? Because they almost did. I should never have to see that much man hair up close, and especially , man hair with product in it. I don't care if it's only an image -- I almost drove into oncoming traffic! And there's the confession: yes, I was looking at cards while driving. I really, really, really try NOT to do this. You kids out there -- take a lesson from Uncle Night Owl. If you open card packages while driving, you're going to end up finding something freakishly frightening like this and have to explain to Nice Mr. Policeman why the front of your car is resting inside the Crispy Creme doughnut shop. I have no ex...