Night Owl Cards

If I want to be impressed/disturbed by how old the set is that I'm currently "attempting" to complete, all I have to do is look up the songs that were popular the year the set was released. For 1967 Topps, those songs would be "All You Need Is Love," "Respect," and "Groovin'," among many others. It doesn't take much analysis to know those groups and even many of the singers are long gone. "The Summer Of Love" is more than 50 years ago now, and what the heck am I doing trying to complete a set that old? Still "Groovin'" fits with how I'm attempting to collect the set. I don't want to think about the impossible high numbers -- as impossible as high numbers get -- right now. I just want to relax and enjoy the '67 Topps cards that are coming to me. Oh, 1967 Topps: life would be ecstasy, you and me endlessly, groovin'. Surprisingly, people have been sending me '67 Topps recently, and one...

I received these two 1969 Topps Stamps from Mark Hoyle awhile ago. I like them quite a bit. Who doesn't like anything with a picture of Don Drysdale on it? And Ron Fairly? Well, he's just dreamy. Ask those Mad Men secretaries from the '60s. But these stamps sat and sat and sat on my card desk for weeks upon weeks, waiting for me to have something to say about them. I had already babbled about stamps before , and, well, nothing else was coming to me. There was another reason why they sat there. I don't know what to do with non 2 1/2-by-3 1/2 items. Oh, I have a lot of irregular cards. I refuse to be prejudiced. But if it's not 2 1/2-by-3 1/2, it's going to have to be really special (see 1975 Topps minis) for me to make specific accommodations. Otherwise stuff like this disappears in a box. And that's terrible. Stamps from 1969 with pictures of Don Drysdale should not go in a box, with a cover, so I can stumble across them once every six months an...

(Happy 4th to all! I hope you're having as nice a time as I am. ... OK, I wouldn't want to wish that on anyone. I hope you're having a NICER time than I am. Even if means reading about The Most Defective Sets I Know). 4. TMDSIK: 1965 TOPPS EMBOSSED I am virtually positive that these cards were very cool when they arrived in 1965. They were inserted into packs of '65 Topps and it was something new for collectors. But there's a reason that they are pretty cheap in comparison to all other cards that hit the market during the mid-1960s. The card image isn't terribly clear, unless you hold it under a light. And the deal-breaker, for me, is that a lot of the facial features either don't resemble the player displayed or it's too difficult to tell whether they do or not. This Ron Fairly COULD look like Ron Fairly. I just can't tell without finding a card of Ron Fairly, holding the two of them together, comparing, and doing a whole lot of squi...

Just a couple of weeks ago I announced my official pursuit of the very colorful, very '70s, very funky 2001 Upper Deck Decade set. The set is an homage to everything I truly love about baseball and cardboard, glossed-up and modernized just enough. Well, not long after my declaration -- Monday, in fact -- my mailman handed me a package about yay big (pretend I'm holding up a baby pig). I opened it up and out popped 75 cards toward the set, direct from the always generous mr. haverkamp. I tell ya, this blog thing is genius, it really is. So after chopping my want list for this set in HALF, I decided to show off some of the cards. For anyone who lived through 1970s baseball, especially if they were a kid at the time, this set is a terrific trip, full of memories of when players were larger than life and dressed like they were float decorations in the Rose Bowl Parade. I get such a kick out of looking at these cards. The memories come flooding back. And the photos -- wh...

One of my stupid "you can't keep everything" moments was when I slipped all of my 45s* out of their protective sleeves, stacked them in a box for easy storage, and chucked all the sleeves . Those sleeves were ART. I threw out ART. I hate it when I'm in Throw Away Mode. Anyway, one of my most favorite record sleeves was for Sammy Hagar's song "I Can't Drive 55." You see the image of it here. It's so simplistic. So direct. So in your face. I love it. It also amuses me that the song came about after Hagar was stopped going 62 miles an hour on a north country road headed to Lake Placid. I'm somewhat familiar with the state troopers in the north country. Of course, now the speed limit is 65 in New York state and the song is hopelessly out-of-date. But the sentiment of the song still works, and for my purposes with Dodger uniform numbers, it works, too. I think. I associate the No. 55 with a single Dodger. Orel Hershiser. He's a ...

With this post, I am getting dangerously close to a "when I was your age I used to walk to and from school uphill both ways" lecture. But it's the only way I can think of to convey how much I enjoy cards like this '68 Topps Jeff Torborg. When I was a kid, there were no boxes to bust, no card stores to visit, no way to send away for cards, and certainly no internet. The best and only way to get baseball cards was to visit your neighborhood drug store. And, yeah, I did walk there most of the time. Cards were hard to come by, even though they were around 10 cents a pack when I first started collecting. The occasions -- and they were truly occasions -- when I received cards were so seldom that I remember each and every one to this day. I remember which store, I remember how many packs. I even remember some of the cards that came from the packs. I didn't accumulate many cards over an entire year. Collecting the whole set was out of the question. I couldn't afford i...