Night Owl Cards

  Well, welcome back card aisle, you're looking rather ... uh ... disorderly. This was the sight at my neighborhood Target yesterday. As disorganized and scattered as it appears, I can count three different baseball card products (four, if you add the MLB stickers) in just this small crop of the card aisle. This is as many different kinds of base ball card products that I've seen on area store shelves since March. With Covid quarantining and t he inexplicable ransacking of card shelves across the country, I've purchased almost no cards in person for the last six months. (On Twitter I mentioned these were the first 2020 baseball cards I had seen on shelves since March, which isn't quite true. I forgot I picked up a couple of scattered packs of Series two a couple of months ago. That's how forgetta ble Topps flagship is this year). Within that frame are a couple of hanger boxes of 2020 Topps Fire, a half-filled gravity fe eder of 2020 Stadium Club and , up at the to...

Topps released its checklist for 2020 Allen & Ginter earlier today. The set hits store shelves next week. Traditionally my favorite release of the year -- well, between 2008 and 2015 anyway -- I ran to the checklist and poured over the contents and ... felt discouraged. The checklist contained mostly baseball players, old and new, with seemingly the fewest selection of non-baseball players ever (I'll have to do a more careful review later). And the non-ball players that were featured contained almost none of what I loved so much about A&G for years: historic figures, wacky inventions or famous landmarks and notable celebrities that you don't need social media to decipher. You may not care about this because you only care about cards with baseball players on them. I know. I hear it every time I bring up A&G, but that's not the point. A&G's switch from history lesson to publicity shill has been going on for about the past five years and, frankl...