Night Owl Cards

  Knowing full well that I was getting very close to completing the 1956 Topps set, I began to obsess about how I would present the news on this blog once it was finished.   I've completed a number of sets in my blogging day, including some of the great card accomplishments of my life, stuff like the '72 Topps set and the '75 Topps minis. But this was 1956 Topps, the first major set that I had completed that was produced before I was born.   Considering that I think it is the greatest baseball card set ever made-- many do -- and my long interest in the set going back decades, this was another blog post altogether.   But what? And how?   OK, I'll get to that later.   I'll first explain how I reached the end of the set.   When I last updated my progress , I had just landed the Mickey Mantle card and there were three cards to go. It was all but definite that I was going to complete the set, which was a feeling totally out of sync with what I thought for l...

I stumbled across the death of Garry Hancock today. His passing more than 20 days ago didn't make a peep on the usual places I frequent, which is why I'm just hearing about it now. Hancock's career was brief, and his death is notable only to those who knew him, and kids like me who grew up in the late 1970s and followed the Red Sox. Hancock, who hit .303 at Pawtucket in 1978 before the Red Sox were prompted to call him up, was one of those hopeful prospects from that period who my brother and I clung to in our continuing quest to ward off the Yankee ugliness of that time. Hancock didn't end up making the impact we had wanted. He was just another in a line of Boston prospects during that time -- between Fred Lynn/Jim Rice and Wade Boggs -- that disappointed. But his death at a too young 61 still struck me, and was made all the more stunning when I remembered this card: Allen Ripley died at this time last year. That's two guys on a card from 1979 that ar...

Although the Fan Favorites sets are fantastic in a wide variety of ways, it's easy to spot the cards that are a little bit off. Topps is basically a victim of its success here. It has created sets and designs that are so familiar that collectors notice immediately when something is not quite right. One of the most significant issues is with the 2003 Fan Favorites Monte Irvin card. Irvin is on the 1952 design, but his signature is missing in the box. There is another version with the autograph. But I won't be pursuing the other version. But there are other examples of some "not quite right" cards that weren't corrected. In many cases they are small things, but I notice this stuff, as I'm sure other collectors do, too. The Fan Favorites cards with the 1985 design always looked a little off to me, but I thought it was only because the letters in the team box were too small. I guess they are a little smaller than the letters on the actual 1985 ...

The Baseball Hall of Fame's official magazine, "Memories and Dreams," is delivered to my newspaper office about six times a year. Most of the time it doesn't have anything to do with my job, but I'm interested in baseball, so I take it home and read it. There's not a lot to it: a few stories about Hall of Famers and exhibits. Some stuff I knew, some stuff I didn't. But the magazine that arrived the other day drew my attention. It was all about baseball cards. The cover features the T206 Honus Wagner. And there are articles about the Wagner card, Jefferson Burdick (known as the father of card collecting), Sy Berger and baseball card exhibits at the Hall of Fame. There's also a story about the explosion of sports memorabilia and card shops in Cooperstown. People who have attended the induction ceremonies recently can't help but notice them. But when I was a kid, there weren't very many memorabilia shops when we visited. Later, I return...