Night Owl Cards

    If you visited my card room -- and I still plan to do some sort of blog tour of it someday -- you would note that one blogger has a notable physical presence in the room without actually being there. That's Rod of Padrographs . He has sent me so much quality stuff over the years. I don't just display anything in a spot where I can see it every day but Rod manages to find things that I don't mind seeing every day. Two of the posters on my card room walls -- the Ron Cey/penguins Nike poster and the owls poster -- are both from Rod. There's a Sandy Koufax children's book on display high on a shelf. That's from Rod, too. And, of course, the Ron Cey-signed birthday card greeting that Rod engineered is in full view as well. The cards in my card room are mostly stored neatly in binders or in boxes, not visible unless you open them. But if you did -- and I do -- you'd see Rod's contributions there, too. The number of cards from Rod in my collection grew rece...

Out of all the manufacturers of the trillions of sets issued during the 1990s, the one I find the most elusive is Pacific. I don't particularly care. I've never been fond of Pacific's cards. But as a team collector, I have this unhealthy interest in accumulating everything , and you don't know how distracting it is (or maybe you do, since you're reading this) to see all of those cards that I don't yet own under the name "Pacific." I am convinced that if I ever become lucky enough to complete everything on my want lists, that the last card I will need will be from a Pacific set. Fortunately, I feel a little bit better about Pacific's avoidance of me after receiving a package from Metallattorney, who is a Red Sox Fan in Nebraska . I'm assuming that's a bit unique. I don't know the typical baseball rooting interest of a fan in Nebraska. Royals? Twins? Rockies? Red Sox seems like a smart choice to me. Whatever the case, I wouldn...

I get a lot of trade requests or offers from people to send me cards. I don't know how it compares with other bloggers -- maybe it's not as much as others, maybe it's a lot more -- but it seems like a lot to me. I try to respond to most, although I do get a little wary if the offer says "hey, I've got cards for you, send me an address." A little more information, please, so I can be reasonably certain that there won't be a human head in the package when I give you my address. But I admit lately I've gotten a bit unresponsive. It's not because of my increasing fear of receiving a human head. It's something more mundane. Before I went on vacation, I was bored by blogging, What I saw on the blogs, what I saw of the cards. Bored, bored, bored. This isn't a comment on anyone's content, it's a comment on me. I just didn't care, for whatever reason. Then, when I went on vacation, I did something I haven't done since ...

Last fall, I mentioned that nobody will ever mistake me for a player collector. I list on my blog that I collect certain players, but that really never has been my primary collecting goal (I still can't get rid of the stalker vibe that I feel when I say I collect a certain player). I'm a team collector and a set collector first and that will always be my way -- at least until Clayton Kershaw has won his fifth Cy Young and I have accumulated enough of his cards that I can't maintain the "I'm Not A Player Collector" lie any longer. But, anyway, I mentioned in that post that I'm not a player collector because, despite my desire to collect specific players, I had almost as many cards of a player that I have not publicly stated that I collect than I had of any player that I HAVE publicly declared as a collecting target. And that player who is not on the official "Dodgers I Collect" list, but yet scads of his cards can be found in my collecti...

HEY! THORZUL! WAKE UP!!!!! THESE ARE ... THE CARDS ... I RECEIVED ... FROM YOUR GROUP BREAK!!! THANKS! (And with that, Annoying Yelling Guy has become a recurring character on this blog). A few notes: 1. I also received some Mets in the break, but I'm not showing those because they won't be staying here long. 2. The break also yielded a healthy stack of Dodger doubles. It's a testament to other bloggers' generosity and a year-and-a-half of trading that I'm accumulating plenty of doubles from the 1990s, a period in which I barely collected. 3. Go back and look at what Sandy Koufax said about Valdes. I suppose Sandy can claim he was misquoted.