Night Owl Cards

  I've been blessed with a few Dodgers-centric packages in the last month. They're most appreciated because I get distracted with other non-Dodger things in my collecting and sometimes I feel that the Dodger part suffers a little. But only just a little.   Thanks to those packages I've reached another milestone. I'm going out of order with when I received the packages here to get straight to that milestone, but you'll see the other packages in good time. I always show them off.   I reached 30,000 unique Dodgers cards yesterday. It was a heavy mail day Monday, which was a nice surprise. Four separate envelopes. The Dodgers started with the beautiful 2024 Finest Shohei Ohtani, which is from the "1993 Finest 'What If ...' Prototype" insert set -- we're just getting more and more complex with our insert names.   That was my own purchase and it was Dodger card No. 29,994 in my collection.     Next up was a surprise envelope from Matt of Cards Over C...

Every time I land some of these 1995 Topps Archives Brooklyn Dodgers cards, I think about how they would have been more amazing to me back in the year that they were issued. I was barely buying cards in '95. And the stage of my collection was not as advanced as it is now. Many of the cards in the '95 Archives set would have had a great deal of appeal because of that. Back then, the only original '50s Dodgers cards that I owned that are also replicated in this '95 set were the 1956 Carl Erskine and the 1956 Don Newcombe. So how cool would it be to have a card that looked like the 1955 Jackie Robinson or the 1953 Roy Campanella or the 1956 Sandy Koufax, even if they weren't the actual cards? Well, now I have the actual '55 Robinson and the actual '53 Campy and the actual '56 Koufax. And I have the original cards for darn near half of the 1995 Archives set if not more. So the appeal may be diminished -- I already have a 1955 Topps Sandy Koufax du...

I periodically correspond about cards with people who are not regular commenters on this site. Most of them are insanely complimentary, which both stuns me while at the same time prompts my ego to run out in the street and scream "YOU SEE???!!! ... I TOLD YOU! ... YOU PEOPLE ARE FOOLS !" Also periodically, those same people send me cards. As if compliments weren't enough. One particularly generous person is named Matt. He has a thing for oddball cards, and he sent me this Nu-Card Scoops card from 1961. I have been aware of this set since I was a wee collector, having seen them in the first price guides and mail order catalogs and the like. But this is the first time I've ever been able to own one. This card is great for probably an infinite amount of reasons. But let me try to list some of them: 1. It's a "moment-in-time" card. In fact, the whole set is made up of moment-in-time cards. You know those "Career Day" cards in Topps S...

My recent vow to make every trade its own post has been a welcome challenge. It's forced me to find something unique about the cards, or at least one card, and write about it. I like that. It's good for me. Like peas and cauliflower and (*gag, wretch*) beets. But it's also causing issues. I'm in major backlog mode. Both physically and mentally. The mental part is that I've got a crapload of ideas from these cards and they're all lined up waiting for their stories to be told. But I have zero time. Zer-O. You don't know how often I wish I was independently wealthy. Not because of the money. But because of the TIME. I need to become a college student again. The physical part is there are cards from trades stacked up all over in the living room waiting, just waiting for somebody, anybody to, for the love of god,   DO SOMETHING . The line of card stacks is getting longer and longer and longer. I can I hear the stacks crabbing about the stac...