Night Owl Cards

  It's amazing to me how my card blogging past continues to pop up in the present, whenever it feels like, and surprise me in all kinds of wonderful ways.   If you haven't discovered this for yourself already, Robert has returned to blogging after suffering some serious health issues. I wholeheartedly wish him the best, and I was thrilled to read that he says connecting through blogging is part of his recovery!   This bit of news arrived at the end of the week that had already provided a blast from my card blogging past. On Monday or Tuesday, I received a large envelope in the mail from a reader, Nolan, who reminded me that we had communicated and traded in the past. I do remember that. I made a futile effort to find evidence on my blog or through email, but I know we connected.     I pulled the above publication out of the envelope and it drew me instantly into the 1970s. Everything about it is '70s through and through. And because of that, I was a kid ag...

  Take a look at this 1977 Topps Bobby Murcer card. Notice anything different?   Sure you do. The card face is cloth, not cardboard.   This fascinated me as a young collector. I was around 12 or 13 when I saw 1977 Topps cloth stickers advertised, probably in our subscription to Baseball Digest magazine. I couldn't conceive of how they could make a card sticker out of cloth. The fact that they were the same size as a regular Topps card and showed the same photos (in most cases) as the regular set made me want them even more.   But I never ordered them, didn't have the money at the time and then later when I got back into chasing cards from my youth, the set was just a little bit cost prohibitive for me. Still, I put them on the "someday" list where they waited for years upon years.   Fast forward to Christmas week 2025. For someone who didn't receive any cards as presents this year, it's been a productive holiday as far as the hobby. The day after Christmas I p...

  There's been a lot of moaning about not be able to go out and about, and when people are able to go out and about, they can't find what they went out and about for (i.e. baseball cards). But when I think about it, I prefer it this way. I actually don't enjoy going to stores that sell cards (or sold cards). My sole mission once I found myself inside a Walmart, aside from finding cards, is "how do I get out of here?" Target isn't any better. Slow people. Packs of people. Screaming kids. Running kids. Messy aisles, blocked aisles, people-filled aisles. Long lines. Judgy cashiers. Wind-blown parking lots. Crazy drivers in parking lots. I could go on.   I'm not a fan of most communal events. It's probably why I'm attracted to a solitary hobby. And I've found, in the last year, that I much prefer ordering my cards in the quiet of my home and then, once they arrive safely and without any potential for exchanging insurance information in the parking ...

  I've already expressed my thoughts on Topps' new online Super 70s set here , here , here and here , so it's about time I spit it out on my own site.   The 2020 Topps X Super 70s set (no, I don't know what the 'X' means) is another Topps online-only collaboration, much like other, so-called "curated" sets. This time, Topps has combined with Ricky Cobb, who runs one of the most popular Twitter sites, Super 70s Sports. If you aren't on Twitter, the Super 70s site is an often amusing tribute to everything 1970s. It's not for everyone, the takes are frequently off-color and some would say antiquated, but for someone who grew up in the '70s, as I did, a lot of the nostalgia that comes from the site makes sense to me. It's one of the few consistently amusing places on Twitter. The set is 90 cards and you might think that something focused on the 1970s would be all about the 1970s, from design to feel to content. Two out of three ain't ...

I said several posts ago that now that I've completed the 2001 Upper Deck Decade '70s set that I'd conduct a full examination of the set that covered the time period when I first became aware of baseball, first watched games on TV and attended them in stadiums, and first collected baseball cards. I like this set a lot because of its colorful tribute to the '70s. It had to be something special to grab my attention during a period when I had no idea what was going on in card collecting. But, like I said a few times before, I spotted it while shopping for something else in a drug store and became fascinated with the cards. One of the things I find most interesting about them is that it is Upper Deck paying tribute to the '70s. That was amusing to me. It's still amusing to me. I always thought of Upper Deck as believing that baseball started when they put Ken Griffey Jr. on a card and that anything before that was not important. And if you look closely at t...