Night Owl Cards

  Almost 15 years ago, Topps started doing something to its flagship set that was reviled by set-collectors at the time. In the 2009 flagship set, it inserted short-prints of legendary players throughout the base set. Those short-printed cards shared a card number with a regular non-short-printed card of a current player. For example, at card No. 320, Miguel Cabrera shares a card number with the short-printed Johnny Mize. Topps had tinkered with SPs in the base set in preceding years and it was all quite controversial. Set collectors at the time -- myself included -- thought adding exclusive cards to the set pursuit was unfair and making the quest to "collect them all" too difficult or plain impossible. Years later, Topps has continued the practice in almost every flagship set since (although have you noticed there aren't any SPs listed in 2023 flagship so far on TCDB?). They are so common now that even people who fumed over those short-prints, like me, don't even pay...

  I am a traditional collector in the modern world.   That causes all kinds of conflicts. I grew up during a time when you walked or biked to the store to buy wax packs and then used those cards to -- maybe one day -- build the set.   We almost never achieved that goal (well, the people I knew didn't anyway) because we didn't have the funds to accumulate 660 different cards in a 6-month span. But the objective each year always made sense to me. The goal was to accumulate as many players and cards that represented that year that you could.   I still think that way, even though set-collecting is even more daunting today than it was when my allowance was like a buck a week. Almost everyone agrees it's impossible today to complete a set the way I did in 1978. It certainly isn't cost-efficient. But I can't help the way I was built or dismiss what I was taught when I was first buying cards. The way the sets were presented 40 years ago, from packaging to appearance to size...

I bought a Topps Project 2020 card. I know for people who read me only on this blog, that's probably a surprise. I've made really only a couple references to Project 2020 on this space, and I wasn't all that thrilled . I'm just a tad more interested here . But I know for people who read me over on Twitter, they're now saying, "yeah, I know, you told us that you bought one months ago." Yup. I did. Back at the end of June. I'm still waiting for the card from Topps. The enthusiasm for the Project 2020 cards, which was at a fever pitch in May and early June, is now almost nonexistent. Twitter used to be crawling with updates on the latest Project 2020 release, whether people liked or disliked it, how much it was selling for, links to ebay sales and so, so, so much that I came very close to blocking "Project 2020," and I never block hobby words. One of the reasons for the bottom dropping out on the series, aside from speculators b...

Everyone knows that there are good surprises and bad surprises. If you've been on this earth for more than 20 years or so, you've had your share of both. In general, I'm not a surprise guy. I like what I like and I stick to that as much as I can. Some would consider that an attempt by me to control things, and I would say, "I didn't ask for your psycho-analysis," but it's more of a roll-with-the-punches thing. I'd rather know what's coming -- because the bad surprises can wear one down -- but if something unexpected shows up, I'm still able to handle it without panicking or running away. When it comes to cardboard, there are more good surprises than bad. Sure, there was that one time when someone sent me 868 Eric Karros cards from 1992 Upper Deck (yes, I still have them). But most of the card surprises are positive, I've found. Card collectors are a thoughtful bunch. Take a recent envelope that I received from RC McBride the ot...