Night Owl Cards

  For years, decades upon decades really, I had no idea how many Dodgers cards I had.   Until maybe 10 years ago, I couldn't be bothered with totaling them up. But then I started the process and a couple of years ago I arrived at a total and have been watching it grow ever since.   So I've known I've been coming up on a team-collecting milestone for quite awhile. I wrote about it in that Beckett magazine article about my pursuit of as many Dodgers cards as I can: I wrote that last fall, knowing the day would be coming. It arrived last week. I received a power-packed envelope from reader Simpson. He was one of the winners in the 5,000-post/5,000-card giveaway. I don't expect anything back from anyone from this giveaway, but the cards sure were pretty. And they got me to that milestone! Let's count them in order of how I pulled them out of the envelope: 24,998 This is one of the medallion things from 2015 when Topps was throwing the "first home run" theme at...

Peter from Baseball Every Night offered to send me this fine 2019 Topps card of Ross Stripling. It's much appreciated and I'll answer him back with some cards around about late May (you think I'm joking, I am not). I like this card because although I touted the benefits of being able to see the full ballplayer on yesterday's post, closeups are fun if they're presented in an interesting way. This is. It's horizontal, the glove is giving off that 3D vibe and Stripling is making funny faces. My guess, though, is that Stripling doesn't (or won't) like this card when he saw (sees) it. Let's flip to the back for why: That's a rundown of Stripling's many, many stats -- it's so nice to have complete stats on the back of baseball cards again. If you filter out all the minor league stats, you will find that Stripling has three years of major league experience, in 2016, 2017 and 2018. His earned run averages for those three years, as ...

Virtually every trade package that I receive in the mail is an adventure. I prefer it that way. Predictability is for envelopes that arrive from ebay and other online sites. What a dull, cardboard world I would live in if I knew exactly what I was getting every time I opened something containing cards. I need that thrill, that sense that I'm getting something that I like, but not knowing exactly what. Trade envelopes are even better than sealed packs from the store because that something doesn't contain Rockies or Marlins or Mariners or those creepy teams I dislike. But they're still always an adventure because chances are that envelope houses something I've never seen before. Just such an envelope arrived last week from Josh of Royals and Randoms. With the exception of the emerald Kenley Jansen that opened the proceedings, everything else was new to me. Emphasis on "new." Emphasis on "adventure." Let's start slowly and then build to ...