Night Owl Cards

I just sent off a package to a Nationals fan. It was packed full of Nationals cards, cards that I haven't been able to trade for years. These must be the best days for collector Chris, the Nationals fan. First the Nationals land the wild card spot, then they beat the Brewers, then the Dodgers hand them the NLDS , then they sweep the Cardinals and are in the World Series for the first time! And then -- and THEN -- this dude with a blog sends him Nationals cards! Some fans have all the luck. OK, well, there were those 100-loss seasons about 10 years ago. I am a typical baseball fan of a certain age that has little use for the Nationals. Yeah, yeah, Scherzer and Strasburg and all that. Doesn't matter much to me. The Expos -- you know, the team MLB stole from Montreal and planted in Washington -- were my most direct route to watching a major league game in person. And it's been a pain in the rump to attend an MLB game ever since the Expos left. I don't cons...

(Today is National Ice Cream Soda Day. As a kid, my folks would take me to Parkside Candy , a Buffalo institution, to get several flavors of industrial-sized lollipops. Then, one day, my dad introduced me to ice cream soda at Parkside. I was spoiled instantly. No ice cream soda I've had since has tasted as good as that one at Parkside's. And now, Cardboard Appreciation. This is the 283rd in a series): In case you haven't heard, today is the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11 landing and man walking on the surface of the moon. I had just turned 4 when this epic, audacious moment took place on U.S. televisions everywhere. I assume my folks were watching but I have no idea. I have no memories of the moon landing. However, the after-effects of that day followed me through my childhood. Astronauts loomed as the country's biggest heroes, larger than life, bigger than even Joe Namath or Hank Aaron. Kids brought space-themed lunch boxes to school, and we often took breaks i...

That would be 2018. It's been coming for awhile. Probably around 2015 or so I began to think "I can't do this anymore. I just can't keep up." Even though from the beginning I always knew that there would be no way I could collect every Dodger card as a team collector, I still had hope for several years. There weren't that many parallels or that many inserts. Sure, there were a bunch of 1 of 1 cards, but I could ignore those easily enough. Then it became a deluge. More and more parallels. More and more inserts. More and more variations. Cards from Panini that I didn't even like and parallels and variations of those . Then the online exclusives came. More and more online exclusives. Topps Now and the Living Set and current players on retro designs that were issued like every week and that weren't available at the store down the street. Then came the club-membership-type deals from Topps where you could sign up and Topps would make cards made exc...

Team collectors: do you find that trying to complete your team sets is getting more difficult? I was feeling pretty good about where I was already with the Dodgers I had accumulated from this year's Allen & Ginter product. With 10 cards down and five inserts landed, I figured I was getting pretty close to finishing it off. Wrong. This year's A&G set happens to include more Dodgers base cards than in any other previous A&G set. There are 17 of them, so I'm barely halfway there. You may chalk this up to the Dodgers showing up in the World Series. But the Dodgers are one of the most popular teams in sports so there's always going to be plentiful cards in each Topps set. I just didn't expect to be so far behind when I thought I was way ahead. I decided to look back on past A&G sets to see how many Dodgers showed up in the base set each year. It turned out it wasn't exactly a straight line going up. 2006: 9 2007: 10 2008: 16 2009: 12...

Every year for the last four years, Bubba's Bangin' Batch of Baseball Bits emerges in July from a semi-slumber for the holiday that is Allen & Ginter Release Month. I participate in the festivities every year because Matt makes it fun, and, of course, there is the chance to win Allen & Ginter cards. I haven't entered all the various mini-contests, but I do enter many of them and I plain struck out the first three years. This year I lucked into a victory. Fourth time's the charm. I didn't have to do much to win. I think the randomizer picked my name from the comment I made. But I DID predict my victory. My comment: I need to do that more often. Matt generously offered up several prize options to the winners. I believe one of the options was close to a full 2018 A&G set. I considered that briefly, then wondered where the heck the binder for that would go and went with a smaller selection of interests. Such as: MINNNIIIIISSSS!!!!!!...

What can I say? Baseball takes four days off and I find something else to do. Don't do that, baseball! On the occasion of finding my first packs of Allen & Ginter cards yesterday, I updated the link on the sidebar, in which I list all of the non-baseball player cards in the base set, with the 2018 set. Here are all your non-baseball players if you're interested in that kind of thing. While compiling the list, I noticed that there are fewer people of the non-baseball persuasion in this set than in any other Topps Allen & Ginter set. There are just 28. It's never dipped below 30 before. Also, when you add the places and things in this year's base set -- there are six -- that comes to 34 non-baseball players, which is the lowest total since 2012, when Allen & Ginter ignored places and things completely and produced 33 cards of people who were not baseball players. I don't know what this means. Perhaps it was a particularly difficult year in land...