Night Owl Cards

  I've reached a realization that's been coming for awhile now. Over the past six or seven years, the quest to pursue every Dodgers card has grown more and more ludicrous to me.    I've known that it's an impossible quest and I've known that probably since the early days of this blog. But even then, even after everything that happened in the 1990s, "collecting them all" still seemed like something I could rationalize. Things hadn't gotten quite so ridiculous. Then, around 10 years ago or so, we started seeing stuff like inserts being paralleled in earnest. Then, around the same time, card companies got into online exclusives and then those exclusives started being issued weekly. Then Panini issued Chronicles, which is sets within a set with multiple parallels of parallels. Then Topps started creating parallel sets, things like Allen & Ginter Chrome. Then Topps started issuing multiple chrome brands, cosmic and sonic and bionic and moronic.   It...

    As card-lovers, and general whiners about everything that Topps does, there are plenty of moments we can cite as reasons why Topps is losing its license with MLB.   Lots of people have serious thoughts on this matter. I'm not that serious. But I do think, in some way, the little things that irritate me about modern Topps products all added up to something important. For example, one of the flat-out mindless things that Topps did recently is issue parallels of its already embarrassing 2021 flagship design, by blatantly copying a competitor. An inferior competitor, IMHO. And it's one of the dumber things that competitor has done (among many). Topps released different versions of its 2021 factory set that includes different kinds of parallels. I haven't looked into it more than that because I haven't been interested in buying a factory set since the mid-1980s. One of those parallels required throwing gold stars along the borders. If that doesn't make you think of P...