Night Owl Cards

   I finally completed my 2025 Heritage High Numbers Dodgers team set yesterday.   The Hyseseong Kim card was the last to arrive at the nest. Of course, it's a short-print and is a part of the infuriating way Heritage is acting recently with online exclusives and short-prints and inflated ebay pricing.     I also wondered if it would ever arrive. It took exactly a month, from purchase to arrival for me to claim ownership. "Rushed" is a funny way to put it. I didn't realize when I bought it that it was through comc consignment -- that violated my "never going to deal with that place again" policy. I guess I have another reason now.   Anyway, ugliness out of the way, I can now celebrate with a Card Numbers for Commons post using Kim's card number -- 719.   To go over the rules, this is the post in which I take a certain card number that once was the domain of commons and find five notable cards with that number in my possession. Then I look for five nota...

  The last post that I wrote was the 5,900th on Night Owl Cards. As I've written before, that doesn't mean a lot except that I've been doing this for too long.   But it is a good prompt for a blog post ... well, semi-good prompt. I thought about writing a Card Numbers for Commons post, using 590 (I won't cover any set with a No. 5900 on principle). But the whole point of this series is to recognize numbers used for "common players." Traditionally, card numbers ending in zero went to stars.   So how about 591 ... for, uh, post number 5901?   Sure. You just want to see nifty cards anyway.    To go over the Card Numbers for Commons rules again, I show off five cards numbered 591 that I own and then five cards that I don't own but would like to maybe someday.   So here are five that I have:   5. 1971 Topps: Jackie Brown   One of the first group of 1971 Topps cards that I owned after trading for them with a friend who would give up all those wonde...

  Touching on another blog series that I haven't tackled for a bit. It's been just over a year since I wrote a "Card Numbers for Commons" post. I definitely should do these more often. The posts aren't time-consuming and I always find them interesting.   This is the series where I look for the five best cards in my collection with a certain card number and then review five other cards that I don't have, with that same number, that I wouldn't mind having. The series title is based on that Topps practice from my younger days in which it would attach a card number ending in a "0" or a "5" to star players and then all the other numbers would be devoted toward the so-called commons.   Today's number is 412. No reason. It was just the first number that popped in my head when I knew I was going to write one of these. "412" is often associated with Pittsburgh as it's the main area code for the city. That's why Bob Bailey i...

  I put on my winter coat this season for the first time Friday. As always when returning to a coat that has hung in your closet for months, the pockets can yield forgotten mundanes from the past. The best: cash; the worst: gum wrappers or discarded tissues. What would it be this time? Well, it was just a grocery store receipt. I looked at the date: March 23. I remembered buying the items on the list. It didn't seem long ago at all, like that happened last month. The year 2024 has gone by in a flash, the fastest year on record, I'm sure. Today is day 337 of 2024 with just 29 days left. It's a nice time to pause for a moment and see what cards I can unearth that were numbered 337 in their respective sets! I haven't played this game in a year and a half so let's get to it. As a reminder, this is a riff on the old idea that stars got numbers that ended in '0' or '5' and common players received the number scraps. I select five notable cards from my colle...

  This is the 5,300th post for Night Owl Cards. It's amazing to me that I've churned out that many posts. I'm fully aware how long I've been doing this, but when I see a number like that, I think "isn't that enough?" But I'm not a quitter ... at least not yet. The brain is always thinking about future posts, in fact the rest of this week, maybe early next week is sort of mapped out, although I never write posts in advance. For today I thought I'd return to my Card Numbers for Commons series. I don't have a lot of time and this should be fairly quick. There is no card No. 5300, unless you're Upper Deck's Yankee Stadium Legacy, so I'm reviewing card No. 53. For those new to the series, this is where I work off the old template that only star players received card numbers ending in "0" or "5" and the rest of the numbers were handed to mere commons. What gold could I find in those common numbers? That's not much ...