Night Owl Cards

  For the first five years of this blog, there was nothing more mind-blowing to me than communicating and trading with collectors from around the world, specifically overseas.   England, France, Australia, Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, I couldn't believe the reach of the blog and how many different people collected baseball cards! I connected with many of them and traded multiple times with some.   Then, slowly, each of them disappeared from the blog space, often without a trace, until it's now just me and some of my Canadian friends.   One collector, though, has turned back the clock, at least for now, by moving from the States back to Japan. Kenny, a.k.a., Zippy Zappy , has been downsizing and refocusing his collection and sending out cards to folks who could use them more than he can.   I received an envelope from Japan a few weeks ago with some cards, and then yesterday a big, fat package from Japan Post was deposited on a chair on my porch. Well, well, t...

    Back in January, when we knew the five former players who were going to be inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame for 2025, I wrote a post on those five players, mentioning how many cards I had of each of them.   I went back to that post to see if I had gained any cards of Dick Allen, Dave Parker, CC Sabathia, Ichiro Suzuki or Bobby  Billy Wagner since.   I did. None for Sabathia or Wagner, but one each for Allen and Suzuki and five for Dave Parker. That makes sense, since Parker is from my era and I always want his cards. But I was surprised I had gathered a whole five and I didn't know which ones those were (the one above is one of them though). The key thing to know is it gave me more than 100 Parker cards as in January the total stood at 99.   Dave Parker's induction was the one I was looking forward to most. Unfortunately, he passed away last month and now the induction ceremony is a lot less interesting to me as both Parker and Allen are gone. ...

  I keep forgetting to acknowledge TCDB and their members for voting my blog as "Favorite Blog" again this year. This makes it five years in a row and six out of the past seven. "Favorite blog" seems like an outdated award even to me -- sounds something like "favorite cassette tape" -- but it shows that people are still reading and still enjoying and it's nice to have that reminder. Or maybe it's like the Gold Glove award and people vote purely on reputation.   There is the medal table, except I get a crown. Now on to the honor that more people care about -- and they really do care about it. The Baseball Hall of Fame announced the baseball writers' selections for this year's Hall of Fame class. Three players are going in -- Ichiro, CC Sabathia and Billy Wagner -- joining the earlier committee picks of Dave Parker and Dick Allen. This means I need to update the Most Hall of Famers tally, which I'll get to when the 2025 class is inducted....

Well, my hope that the purchase of a 1956 Ted Williams card would take care of any impulse buys for awhile didn't really come to pass. I was doing a little bit of late-night shopping at Walmart yesterday and I figured it would be a good time to check out the card aisle when there isn't a giant line of customers standing in front of it. I got so excited at a clear pathway to the cards that I totally forgot why I was there in the first place. There really wasn't a lot there of interest. But the Allen & Ginter section was well-stocked so I grabbed what is only my third non-Big League blaster of the year (I don't count Big League since it's half the cost of a regular blaster). I thought I'd do another round of my Power Rankings posts with this since through eight of these posts I've never done one with A&G. I think the reason for that is there are lots of non-baseball team cards in A&G and it's not great for determining which teams hav...