Night Owl Cards

  For the past five or six months, my job has bled into my midweek free time. I've been trying to keep it away from my blogging for as long as I've been able.  But since the powers-that-be continue to ignore reason, I don't see this time-crunch changing for the next year, and, as much as I don't like it, Night Owl Cards may cut back to publishing 3 or 4 times a week for the foreseeable future. For instance, it's midweek right now and I have all of 40 minutes here to myself. I thought I'd steal Diamond Jesters' year-in-review idea for some content. Unlike my traditional end-of-the-year cavalcade of words , it's a nice, concise, stat-driven look at the past year. Let's take a peek: Blog overview: I am in my 17th year of running this blog (and have run various other set blogs for about 15 years). For Night Owl Cards, this is my 5,664th post. There was talk a few days ago about saving your posts physically in the event the internet goes away. This was a...

  I've been pretty damn busy today, really pretty damn busy the last few weeks, and it makes me sad that I can't spend all the live long day looking for 2024 Topps.   That's partly Topps fault for deciding to release its flagship set on The Relationship Holiday and two days after The Biggest Football Thing Ever. Give us a chance to breathe, man!   It's also the time that I recognize the birthday of my all-time favorite player, Ron Cey. Today is that day. He's 76 today and wow, I hope I get to be 76.   Last year, on his 75th birthday, I showed all of the 1975 cards in my collection. I'll do that for you now with '76.   Lots of round cards to go with the square ones. (I swear those four that look almost exactly alike are different). I also have that Linnett Superstars oversized item somewhere, but there's zero time to search for it. Usually I take the time to find a new Ron Cey card for my collection on this day. I've done that -- sorry, it's anoth...

 (Hey look, part-time blogger night owl has another post up! Sorry again for the infrequency. I should be back to the regular 5-days-a-week-but-not-quite-8-hours-a-day posting schedule next week. For now, it's just one card, because it's time for Cardboard Appreciation. This is the 333rd in a series):   Today is the anniversary of the Dodgers signing Hideo Nomo so I've got a timely post. I like those. I keep telling myself to cut back on all the social media outlets but then I go and add another one with the Baseball Card "House of Cardboard" Discord site. (I've cut back on Facebook and Twitter, so I suppose it evens out). The attractive part of social media for me still is: I find out baseball card things. Like the card above, for example. This card is from an insert set from 2005 Donruss called "Inside View". Now comes the part I didn't know until I saw a discussion on Discord: The set was pulled from production by Donruss, but somehow some of ...

  I don't know about you other bloggers but sometimes I have big plans for this blog, but the plans are too big and halfway in the middle of prepping, I look at the clock and I have to pivot to Plan B or Plan C. I don't mean to say that anything in Plan B or Plan C is second-best, it's just not what I had planned for today.  I had planned the next installment of the 1975 Topps Worst-To-Best Countdown, it's well overdue, but it's not ready yet. (I guess this is why people schedule posts in advance, but I can't get myself to do that).   So I'll show off what appeared in an absolutely giant box of cards that Johnny's Trading Spot sent me probably a couple of weeks ago now. I've been sorting through it ever since and I'm still not done with the baseball part. I am finished with the non-baseball stuff, so let's go with that in Part 1. John very nicely sent me a full set of 2021 Topps Chrome Tennis. I have mentioned a time or two that I'm inte...

I haven't had much time for card stuff lately and during a brief break in the action yesterday (i.e. someone I needed to interview stiffed me), I decided to stop by Target and buy some cards just to prove I still could. I wound up with a blaster of last year's Archives, which ideally would be fun. But I've finished off almost all the Dodgers and I'm not trying to complete the set so this was purely a mad money purchase. Also, when I opened the blaster it occurred to me why I avoided Archives blasters last year: 1. Those blasted Sandlot cards. I'm about 1 of 2 bloggers who doesn't appreciate that movie and there is no reason for me to have the cards. I ended up with one of the cards -- don't ask me who it was, it wasn't the girl or the guy in the Dodgers hat. 2. Coins The coins are an exclusive to the blasters. I've never gotten into collectible coins. I have several of the '60s ones but that's because they're from the '...

Not sure how much I'll be posting here in the next few days. Posting is already sporadic and it's about to get super-radic, if you know what I mean. If you do see regular posting know that I'm exerting myself far beyond what I usually do to get something on here. The only thing there's time for today is opening a pack. No thought, just cards. I had planned to save this for A Pack To Be Named Later , but desperate times, man. Besides, Series 1 and Series 3 of '94 Stadium Club have already been opened there. I don't want to be too repetitive. This is one of the dollar packs acquired at the card show in Vermont. 1994 Stadium Club is a weird bird. Much like everything in '94, Stadium Club was trying to get younger. Trendy. What the kids like. So it overhauled its three-year look, added some edgy graphics, slapped "extreme" and "premium" on everything, and hoped that kids would buy baseball cards -- in the middle of a baseball strike....