Night Owl Cards

I am trying the plow through that worst work week of all work weeks: the week after a vacation week. That week, always trying, was exacerbated by a compacted and very busy high school sports schedule. As usual I feel like I'm being punished for daring to enjoy a few days off on my own, like someone assessed a week's worth of penalties for the crime of having off-time. I'm now serving my sentence in the box. So I've been struggling to get to my hobby all week with spotty success. You are allowed only a certain amount of cards in the sin bin. I pulled together two different card packages sent fairly recently that each contained some of the same cards. Here are the cards from Starting Nine : Here are the cards from The Collective Mind : You can see I have two to spare. These are the tarot card-themed inserts from Gypsy Queen this year. A lot of people love these. I'm not into them. They go with the circus-freak vibe of GQ the last couple of yea...

A couple of weeks ago I was observing the nonstop Shohei Ohtani babble on everyone's favorite/most-hated social media platform and it made me wonder when I would land my first Ohtani card. I guessed it would be sometime around October. I don't pursue the newest rookie sensation each and every year. I don't rush out to find packs of Bowman. I haven't been in a card aisle for weeks and it could be several more weeks before I visit again. So, October sounded about right. There will probably be a dozen Ohtani cards in Topps Update, I'll pull one of those then. Well, the funny thing about saying things out loud -- or typing them out loud -- is there is always someone listening. So, when I arrived from out of town a few days ago, there was a package waiting for me from Marc at Remember The Astrodome . Amid all of the Dodgers goodness that fell out of the envelope was the above Opening Day card of 2018's poster boy, Shohei Ohtani. Mark it on your calendars. ...

I went out of town for a couple of days and while I was there received a bit of bad news with regard to family. I'm not comfortable discussing it here, in small part because I don't entirely know what the news means, whether it's a little bad, a lot bad or some sort of false alarm. But the key thing I'm taking from this news is how important patience is. In general, I'm a patient person, probably much more patient than most people, going as far as it being a detriment in that I can be too patient. But there are times when I don't exercise enough patience. Surprise, surprise, often those times involve cards. Recently, I received a bunch of 2018 Topps Opening Day Dodgers from Matt at Once a Cub . He has busted an entire case of Opening Day, started an OD blog , and had promised to distribute lots of extras to fellow collectors. I wasn't exactly thinking about that though when I was at a card show a couple of weeks ago and started pulling as many D...

We've reached the part of the baseball card release calendar that I've started calling "The Dead Zone". After Topps flagship and Heritage comes a number of products that don't appeal to me and I wouldn't miss if they disappeared. Opening Day is redundant. Panini Donruss is incomplete and often incompetent. Gypsy Queen is too expensive for really ugly cards. After that, I believe, is Bowman, which means less to me than the three other sets I just mentioned. It's a long gap between Heritage and the return of stuff I I'm interested in, like Series 2 and Allen and Ginter. A whole season goes by before Series 2 shows up in June and A&G appears at some point in the summer. That's quite the wait. And although I'm more immersed in vintage and other non-current collection pursuits than ever, it's weird to go so long without sampling some cards. It's been three weeks since I've sampled from my local Target or Walmart. So, t...