Night Owl Cards

I scheduled kind of a bummer of a post for today, which still may be coming, that depends entirely on the distributors to my local big-box stores. Fortunately, things are a little more upbeat around here today because the 2018 Allen and Ginter checklist is out! We've reached the baseball card crunch period of the season. The new Big League Baseball set supposedly hit streets today. I still haven't seen Stadium Club, which released a couple of weeks ago. Series 2 isn't a month old. And now Allen and Ginter is scheduled for release next week. As much as I like Stadium Club and as promising as Big League Baseball is, my heart remains with A&G. The checklist release is the most interesting of the season and this year is no exception. The baseball players are the same as usual, a mix of current stars, rookies and legendary players (the legends are getting pretty damn stale, but that's a post for another time). But the excitement lies with the non-ballplayers a...

I get a lot of packages in the mail. Not as many as I think I should get, but a lot. Many of those packages contain notes. Not all of them, but most. (By the way, don't you hate it when you write a note and then seal the package without including the note? This has happened to me numerous times). But how many times do I get a note that makes me stop and think and ponder what we're doing here? Very few. Congratulations, Bubba ' s Bangin ' Batch of Baseball Bits , you made night owl get out his thinking cap. Matt recently sent me a Let's Make a Deal-ish package. Included were 12 team bags containing what appeared to be Allen and Ginter needs. But the contents were partially hidden, like so: You folks have way more time on your hands than I do, but I appreciate the effort. I like games. Each numbered slip of paper contained a note, and it was the first note that made these mystery bags make sense. It was also that note that caused me to stop and ...

Lots of things to address lately, but as usual, I am ill-prepared. So let me address, instead, the jumble of cards on the desk that I have received over the last month. It's such a jumble that I am beginning to lose track of who sent what. And that means if you've been an extremely busy bee at sending out packages -- like Jeff of 2 by 3 Heroes -- then it's a guarantee that I'm going to mess up something that you shipped out. Nothing tragic, mind you. I just can't figure out whether Jeff has sent me two packages or three packages in the last three weeks. First-world problems, I know. I was going through the disheveled stack -- with cards angled in different directions in a vain attempt to alert future me that "here begins a completely new package that he sent" -- trying to determine if he once, twice, three times sent me a package. I've finally settled on three times -- which is probably wrong, but it gives me the opportunity to force that terr...

When we last left the Storybook Binder, the plethora of Dodger cards from the '90s and '00s had transformed into very recent Dodger wants and set needs. I have the other half of the binder, which @ grogg sent, to show here, but there is one thing I forgot to display in the first post. This is the side of the binder. Greg inserted a 1975 Topps Garry Maddox card into the opening. This is the sign of a faithful reader and a thoughtful gift-giver. Not only is the '75 Topps set my favorite, but if you've read the 1975 Topps (it's far out, man) blog, you know how much that particular Maddox card means to me, and meant to me as a child. Very cool. OK, let's turn the page to the next story in the binder. I left off with a page of 2015 Topps Series 2 wants and here is the other full page of wants from that set. By the way, I've accumulated quite a stack of dupes from 2015 Topps. If you need any, let me know. The 2015 wants morph into 2014 Al...