Night Owl Cards

  I received a mailer the other day and I can't decipher the sender. There's the familiar "ebay" shipping label in the front, but the cards inside, although tailored to my interests, aren't anything I ordered. The return address has a female name, but I don't recognize it, and with the amount of female collectors I've come across during the life of this blog, I would know if she was a past trader. The envelope came from Minneapolis, and again, the collectors I know from Minneapolis don't go by that address and none of them have a significant other with that woman's name, I don't think. I don't know. I don't know them that well.   So, with no note and nothing else to go on, I have to assume it's some bygone acquaintance.   This blog is in its 13th year and I've communicated with hundreds of collectors and received almost as many packages. The list of bloggers who are no longer blogging about cards is massive and impossible to fit...

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...

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 ...