Night Owl Cards

  It's been more than a year since I did one of these. There are reasons for that: These posts are brutally time-consuming and I should do posts like this in shifts, but I haven't learned to do that. Also, I'm covering a time period in which I didn't collect and also a time period in which set-collecting was going out of style.   But I'm plowing through, at least for another year.   It's 1997 and that sound you hear is me opening a single pack of Topps and thinking "well, that's enough of that."  That's all I did in collecting in 1997. But it was more than I did in 1996, which was absolutely nothing! For me, 1997 is about taking a job that I still have and preparing for the arrival of our first kid. All to the theme of "I get knocked down, but I get up again, you're never gonna keep me down." (Yeah, I know, you hate that song). Like in 1996, far too many sets were issued in 1997 and a whole bunch of them couldn't even muster 4...

I picked a strange year to fully rejoin the modern collecting scene. My return was in 2006, but I didn't realize all that was out there until 2008, when this blog started. And, 2008 -- how do I describe 2008? It wasn't the greatest year for cards. Oh, I'm sure some are nostalgic for it. Upper Deck was still around. You could get presidential people on your cards if you liked that kind of thing. But, damn, there were some weird sets. Upper Deck Documentary. Topps Moments and Milestones. Upper Deck Spectrum. Upper Deck Yankee Stadium Legacy. And the set that I still haven't figured out: Topps Co-Signers. Since I am a poor, retail-bound collector -- and was even more so in 2008 -- I don't get a handle on hobby-issue sets. They're strange and unfamiliar. But Co-Signers made it particularly difficult to comprehend for a plebeian like me. Any Co-Signers cards I received were the box-breakers' "discards," such as that really ugly Brad Penny c...

I was supposed to have completed my 2010 Topps base set today. The last three cards that I needed -- plus this Blake DeWitt card for my Dodgers team set -- arrived this afternoon from Sooz of A Cardboard Problem . There are the elusive little critters now. So that was that, right? Time to find a binder and pages to house this baby. Not so fast. I know myself too well. Upon completion of a set, I now immediately review whether I have actually officially completed the set. There have been too many times -- especially with these large sets and the fact that I have 49 thousand things going on at once -- in which I have skipped a card when typing up a want list. Well, it happened again. I still need one more card. It's #442. Dan Runzler. He's a pitcher. Don't ask me to tell you anything more about him because he's a Giant. And because of that, he doesn't deserve my research. I won't show a scan of the card filched from a website either, becaus...