Night Owl Cards

Stop tapping your foot. I have my reasons. I was out of town during my daughter's college orientation. My dog has arthritis in his back and neck and lets out the most ear-piercing, heart-wrench squeals of pain. I'm juggling about five different tasks at work that each, by themselves, is known for being time-consuming. Baseball cards are still on my mind. But that's as far as those thoughts travel these days. It's 10:45 at night and I'm really too tired to type out words, but it's important to show the cards that people have sent me. Some period of time ago, I received an email from Kyle of Nolan's Dugout reconnecting and letting me know he had some cards off my want list. Back then I had time to reply to emails, and that's why I have some cards now to show. Ah, yes, clearly I am out of practice and need to go back to blogging school if I'm starting out with a 1988 Fleer card. But actually it's the final card I needed to complet...

I'm warning you, I'm too tired today to be creative. And I'll probably be so tired tomorrow that I won't post. This is nothing that I want to do. I think you know if I had my way completely, I would post five times a day and get paid to do that and nothing else. But, dammit, people who don't care about baseball cards are the worst. Their priorities are all screwed up. The people who do care trade with me. And they're the best kind of people. So let's get to the rest of the cards that GCA of The Collective Mind sent to me. This is the baseball portion of the package -- or what I so creatively titled as "The Baseball Stuff". ... sigh ... I want to go to sleep so, so much. I will start with what I am now calling "necessary-but-not-sufficient" cards. These are foil parallels from last year. If I were told I had to throw out some of my cards tomorrow, these foil things would be the first items in the trash. I collect them becaus...

Just before Twitter bud ( @grogg ) and fellow namesake (Greg) took off halfway across the country for his new place of residence, he shipped me this big ol' box of surprise. In the past, Greg has sent me all kinds of cards and in all kinds of formats. Once they arrived in a complete binder. But this package was a little bit different and didn't contain any hand-selected cards. Instead, the surprise was in the opening: Two boxes of the only Panini baseball set I've ever cared about, 2013 Hometown Heroes. That's 24 packs-per-box, chums, all of which I got to open. I rarely get to do this. I've mentioned my intentions of completing this set on the blog a few times and Greg noticed. The tricky thing about this set, though, is that I've accumulated much of it already. Most of what's left are a handful of base needs and the almost impossible image variation cards that make up the final 40 cards in the set. So I was interested to see what kind o...

You know me, I like to mix my card acquisition posts with my card observation posts and other silliness. It keeps things interesting, both for me and the reader. But the packages have been arriving at such a rate that I've been forced to rethink that for this week. After all, it is the week before Christmas, and it just seems like the thing to do, to show off the giving and receiving. Plus, as I mentioned yesterday, three large packages were stuffed into the mailbox on Tuesday. I need to address these before the holiday. And I'm going to do that on three successive posts. That will bring me right up to Christmas Eve, and I'm sure to be in a very festive mood then after all the recent cardboard arrivals. The first fat package I'm going to address came from Adam of ARPSmith's Sportscard Obsession . Adam's back in the swing of things on his blog, which I'm always glad to see. He sent one primary item that made up the bulk of the package. But I'm ...

Panini has issued a number of popular sets in other sports, or so I've been told. I don't collect basketball or soccer or any of the sports where Panini seems to thrive. I collect baseball -- major league baseball only, please -- and, lordy, does Panini struggle in that area. I'll try not to regurgitate all of the issues that I have with Panini here, because this is a happy Panini post. Or as happy as I can get about Panini anyway. This is a post about the only Panini set that matters -- to me. The Panini Hometown Heroes set from 2013. Hometown Heroes is one of a handful of retro sets that Panini issued at that time. There was Cooperstown, which thought it could crop off the tops of heads of players in its photos and I wouldn't notice. There was Golden Age, which had limited appeal for me because I just don't care about race horses from the 1920s if it's not Allen & Ginter. But Hometown Heroes? Hometown Heroes appealed to me in a variety of ways. ...