Night Owl Cards

  We're all dealing with our various life issues. I, for example, look at the stacks of cards in the card room and the separate pulled cards for half-finished blog posts and think "what can I blog quickly in the hour I have to spare?"   But I know I have it good. Other folks can blog maybe once a week (maybe I should try that), or even once a month. Nick, of the blog Dime Boxes , put his blog on hiatus a couple of months ago to tackle those real world demands.   We few survivors in the card blog community often wonder what those departed bloggers are doing. Do they still read blogs? Do they still collect? Have they turned away from the hobby for a life at the country club? Are they wandering the streets aimlessly? What has become of them?   Well, I can report that Nick is alive and well. He is still "lurking" he says and, from what I received from him about a week ago, he is still going to shows/collecting like he's always done. There is no sign that real l...

  I didn't post yesterday, mostly because I was gathering my thoughts (and pictures and scans) on what I was going to say about the latest step in Sports Illustrated's demise. The news yesterday was so stunning that I almost couldn't believe it and didn't want to write anything about it for fear it was all internet hysteria and we could go back to pretending that print journalism was still on a ventilator and not one final shovel of dirt away from burial. But it doesn't appear to be good news in any event. The patient is dying. The end is near.   This past week was terrible for traditional sports journalism. The Sporting News laid off folks, including Ryan Fagan, who I've mentioned a few times on this blog and was basically the face of TSN for me. Then the news about SI laying off virtually everyone appeared. I knew the faces of a couple of the writers who are losing their jobs there, too, thanks to social media. This is crushing. And this type of stuff is a re...

  Last month I pulled this card after purchasing the first cards I had seen for sale in a full aisle display since the early days of the pandemic. It's stunning when you think of it, that out of all the chrome refractor parallels numbered to 673 -- hundreds of possibilities -- I would pick the Wander Franco card. It's just as stunning the price it went for after I put it up for sale. It sold for $258.07. That blows my mind. It also boggles my mind that there were 87 watchers and 463 page views. None of this makes sense. I would never pay that kind of money for a card unless I had invested a lot of time into that player (or that set) over a number of years -- not somebody who just burst onto the scene in the last year or two. But that's our hobby now and thank goodness in at least one way -- I got to spend almost $200 on cards I actually want! You're gonna see them. All told, I ended up with 65 cards for a single card. I won't show all of them, just the stuff that...