Night Owl Cards

I just wrapped up my first notable card purchase of 2020. It was an online order -- from three of every collector's favorite card-buying sites -- and with the exception of three inserts from 2019 and a stray card from 1989, every single card I ordered was made prior to 1980. That feels good. That feels tremendously good. I'm starting off 2020 in the right frame of mind. It's also a good way to put a cork in the 2019 collecting season. There are various ways you can say you're done with the cards from the previous year, call it degrees of doneness, if you will (I order steaks "medium" or "medium well," I don't need anything crawling off my plate). 1. You can be done with collectin g sets from 2019. I'm certainly done with that. I didn't try to collect many sets from that year anyway. The 2019 Topps Holiday set and a third of the 2019 Topps Archives set are finished and that's everything I plan to do. 2. You can be done...

Score was my kind of card company. Sure, I've always been a Topps fan, and Fleer is right up there, too. Score didn't do everything right (looking squarely at '92), but during that baseball card paradigm shift of the late 1980s, I was definitely part of Team Score. Collectors aligned themselves into two camps at that time -- well, they would have if the internet was around in 1989 anyway. I'm told we're all so damn divided these days. But as we collectors went about our business by our lonesome back then, some of us gravitated to Upper Deck and some of us gravitated to Score. I felt the pull of Score, although I admit I didn't even see Upper Deck for at least the entire 1989 collecting season if not longer. But Score appealed to me immediately. It was colorful, it was action-packed and it was informative. It produced the "thinking collector's" card. Turn over that card and Score could give you a thorough rundown of Thomas Howard's prog...

Last week I headed down to my parents' house to get ready for the final goodbye to Dad. I figured I'd need a little pick-me-up while I was there, so I stopped at a Target on the way and grabbed the only thing on the baseball card rack that interested me -- a blaster of 2019 Big League. I also planned on this blaster being my Father's Day baseball card gift if I didn't get one from those people who tend to buy me Father's Day gifts. It proved to be a wise move because not only did I pull the above Max Muncy card, which if you ask me is the front-runner for card of the year, but I in fact received zero baseball card gifts for Father's Day. That is not to say that the family did not choose well on the gift front. Both gifts I received involved food, which I would say runs a close second to cards except for the three times a day when it beats cards by a mile. My daughter went so far as finding a gift in a fancy cheese shop near where she goes to school. I...