Night Owl Cards

  I love putting together little countdown shows. It's a lot of work, especially if you want to be complete about it. But they're pretty popular, which is great because I like my writing to be as entertaining as it can be. It's good to know that readers like what I like. The Greatest 100 Cards of the 1980s Countdown was not as easy to compile as the earlier Greatest 100 Cards of the '70s list. Many more cards in the decade meant many more cards to sift through, many of which I didn't own. Somewhere around looking through every 1986 Fleer card I asked myself, "what the hell am I doing?" But it turned out pretty well I think. There are a lot of cards that I listed as potential candidates that never made it. And because there are so many card from the '80s, you could easily assemble a list of "The Best Cards Of The '80s That Idiot Night Owl Forgot To Include." As I mentioned a few times on the countdown, I only included rookie cards in the c...

Here we are. The greatest 10 cards of the 1980s. I'm sure I'm going to ruffle some feathers here. As someone who had been collecting for five full years when the 1980s began, I see cards in a different way than those who started collecting in the '80s. My countdown reflects the '80s as I knew them, as a teenager and college student. Beer, road trips and alternative radio, not the Transformers and the Fresh Prince. But famous cards are famous cards and I can't discount some of the hyped pieces of cardboard that came out in the '80s. So expect to see some of those in the final 10. You should know every card I show here. Before I get to that, I'd like to rank the greatest years to collect cards in the 1980s. I did this before, way back in the early days of the blog. But that was practically prehistoric times. Let's do it again: 1. 1984: Card designs were never better across the board than in 1984. 2. 1988: The year that kids started telling their teacher ...

  Big news at the night owl nest today. I subscribed to MLB.TV. Finally, I can watch any game I want this season. I no longer have to suffer with seeing the Mets play the Marlins for the 197th time or grit my teeth through Michael Kay because there's no baseball to watch anywhere else. I can ignore the Yankees for 162 games if I want! And that's what I plan to do. The Phillies-Orioles spring training game is on right now and then I'll search out something even more obscure later. I know, I know, I'm late to the party. That's the way it's been when it comes to entertainment viewing for most of my life. Taking years to land an MLB subscription was more of a cash-flow issue, but when I was younger, I'd miss out on the popular movies all the time because of a relatively sheltered existence. While high school classmates were quoting lines from Caddyshack and Stripes in the lunch room and on the school bus, I knew mostly Star Wars movies and E.T. HBO was the big t...

  I often call this current period of the television sports calendar the black hole of sports programming. The time between the end of the Super Bowl and the beginning of televised Spring Training baseball games is an empty void when I'm looking for something to watch on traditional television. I don't watch the NBA and the NHL on TV holds my interest for maybe a period. College basketball I can't watch until the tournament. This didn't used to be as much of a problem back when I could turn instead to my favorite sitcoms in February. Do you remember when February was "sweeps month"? (Maybe it still is, I don't know). Networks would make sure that every top show aired original episodes that month, no reruns. So you'd always have something to view during the week even when the sports scene was boring. (I know, people have multiple streaming viewing options now. But I find myself going weeks sometimes before I see something I want to view on Netflix or Am...

  I had the good fortune to experience almost all of my high school and college years within one decade, and that decade was the 1980s.   With the exception of the first half of my freshman year in high school, all my high school and college years took place between 1980-88. For this reason, I will always have great affection for the '80s. Many of my most enjoyable youthful memories took place in that decade. If I had to rank the years of that decade in terms of how much they meant to me in my life, which ones contained the best memories, it would go like this: 1987, 1983, 1988, 1984, 1986, 1985, 1989, 1982, 1980, 1981. The deciding factors in those rankings are: who was in my life, what was happening in my life then, and the music at that time. Baseball cards play into it probably only with 1983. And that's hardly the reason why '83 is ranked so highly. But because life was rather carefree at that time (although some of those early high school years were pretty much crap),...