Night Owl Cards

   Someone on social media posed the question the other day regarding Rickey Henderson's domination of the American League stolen base title during the 1980s.   Henderson led the AL in stolen bases every year from 1980 through 1991 except for one.   The question: who led the league in stolen bases the year Henderson did not?   I had no idea.   I was on top of that stuff during the latter half of the 1970s and early 1980s. That's because baseball cards were there for me, specifically league-leader cards. I've mentioned many times how I relied on baseball cards to tell me important facts from the previous year -- league leaders, postseason results, records broken, etc. I went to cards before the newspaper or TV.   That's how those facts entered my head and stayed there. If someone asked me who led the American League and National League in batting average in 1977, all I needed to do was picture the '78 League Leader card with Dave Parker and Rod Carew on...

  You are going to see, or you have already read, many tributes to Rickey Henderson today.  A lot will discuss his mind-blowing skill on the base paths and how he changed the game in the 1980s. Many will discuss his entertaining personality and how he referred to himself in the third person. Some, like us card bloggers, will talk about his cards -- his rookie card in particular -- and how he became their favorite player. All of those tributes will seem to lack something in attempting to sum up the man. This one also will fall short. That's because Rickey Henderson, who passed at age 65, was the greatest I ever saw play. I am always uncertain when people ask me to come up with the best of whatever, musician, artist, designer, inventor, etc. How can you settle on just one? But with Henderson there is no doubt. He was it. I saw it and instantly knew. He's the best damn player I've ever seen. And how do you explain why he was so great and why he captivated collectors without mi...

I completed the 1981 Fleer set when this card arrived in my COMC order last week. I'm pretty sure this Rickey Henderson card was the last card I needed because I thought I had it already. But, of course, I didn't have it already, I had this card: One is card #574 in the set and one is card #351 in the set and I hope you can see why I got a bit confused. The 1981 Fleer set is full of confusion and I can say that as someone who had been collecting for six full years before Fleer decided to issue its first full set and, my goodness, what in the world do we have here? We collectors were not used to what Fleer was throwing at us. Those collectors who came along later must wonder what all the fuss was all about, but, listen, collecting was pretty straightforward prior to 1981. Players did not appear on a second card unless it was in some sort of special subset. But here was Fleer producing second cards of all kinds of stars, and -- to top it off -- confusing the car...

There is a discount store on the other side of town that has been the topic of at least a dozen posts here, going way back to the first few months of the blog. The card offerings at the store, an Upstate New York chain called Real Deals, have never been as good as they were when I first posted about it. Back then you could find random offerings of early-to-mid 1980s Fleer mixed in with a stray 1990s Pacific card, and, of course, the usual junk wax. But the store is worth checking out periodically. Sometimes there are no cards at all. Sometimes someone has just opened a box of 1990 Fleer and a box of 1988 Score. You just never know. Nobody's getting anything they can display on a mantel here, but the potential for a fun rip is always there. The last time I was interested in the cards offered there is when my wife brought home a few packs of 1988 and 1989 Donruss. I'm the last collector on earth that enjoys opening a pack of that stuff, and as long as it was sitting on a...

I was listening to a podcast a week or two ago by Jesse Spector of The Sporting News. It was sort of a many-topic discussion with baseball cards as its base. It amuses me when people with high visibility and a large fan base feature baseball cards, eliciting an overwhelming reaction. I try not to think to myself, "hey, I featured that card 5 years ago and wrote a whole blog post about it and got a couple of crickets," but sometimes it just spills out. Heh. Anyway, I decided to give a listen to what they had to say about cardboard -- any kind of attention for the hobby is great, right? Jose Bautista and Facebook and bat flips, right? Can't be boring the kids with no Mario Mendoza. So, on the podcast, they discussed a few Dodger cards because Dodger beat guy Eric Stephen was the guest. They began by talking about an Orel Hershiser card, his last Topps card, and how it doesn't look all that different from his earlier cards. They discussed how Hershiser hasn...