Night Owl Cards

I am not one of those people who receives a gift card for his birthday and then six months later discovers "Whoops! (hee. hee). Here's that 50 dollars I forgot all about!" Nope, I lie in wait for my chance to get what I want. When the chance arrives, it's cashed in before it knows what hit it. And I have what I want. Instantly. There is no, "oh, what should I get? Hmmmm. Gee whiz. Maybe that ... no, no, maybe this .... no, uh, how about this? ... well, there's always this. ... Oh, I just don't know." JUST BUY SOMETHING ALREADY!!!!!!!!!! Seriously, the year is jam-packed with days in which I can not afford to buy an 85-cent bag of Doritos in the vending machine. So the potential arrival of birthday money is charted, plotted, circled and underlined thricely on the calendar. In the "Me Want" folder are lists and graphs and drawings, updated weekly. Yet, here it is, a month-and-a-half after my birthday, and I'm showing more birt...

Slightly more than a year ago, we were coming to grips with an odd little Topps offering called "Lineage." It featured a rather boring base set with the most pointless card backs since Upper Deck dared put out a baseball product. But the inserts were nostalgic and fun and basically the whole excuse for the set. I was caught up in Lineage Fever last summer and decided to pursue just one of the insert sets -- the tribute to my first year of collecting -- the Lineage '75 minis set. The set is 200 cards large and I thought it was ridiculous of me to chase an insert set that large. It was something I had never done in all my years of collecting. Well since that time, Topps has moved on, and everyone else has moved on. Lineage has basically become Archives, a set that left me cold. But I stayed firmly entrenched, pursuing those tiny, colorful Lineage parallels to the bitter end. Slightly less than a year after I announced my wild-and-crazy quest , I am very close to ...

I just dropped the scanner lid on my fingernail. The lid is thicker and heavier than it has any need to be, and one the many visible signs that my scanner was created by baboons. At any rate, my finger hurts and I'm trying to type without it, but it's not going very well. So let's see how long this lasts ... I'm very excited about my next post -- that's right, the post after this one. Sorry you're not reading my best effort this time around. But just to lead into that exciting post, I'm showing you some minis I've received lately. The most recent card packages I've received have been mini-heavy and they're about to consume the card desk, so I've got to get them out of the way. Here are some sent to me from a mini-exclusive package by Brian at Play At The Plate : The most excellent Clayton Kershaw and Andre Ethier and the departed James Loney. The Kershaw will be going toward the new frankenset quest because I received a pair of K...

AP If you're a Dodger fan and you're still trying to absorb this weekend's trade and what it all means, then, welcome to my little club. I call it "The Ghost of George Steinbrenner Has Possessed My Team." I have never witnessed such a gambling acquisition of star players since Steinbrenner was in power with the Yankees. It's a fantasy league trade. It's a trade dreamed up in comic books. It's crazy. It's bizarre. I'd almost say it's ridiculous, but I'm hoping that somebody in upper Dodger management knows what he's doing. I don't know how to feel because I've spent virtually my entire baseball-rooting career bagging on a certain team for buying players. It feels kind of good, but it feels kind of bad. And it all feels kind of unsettled. Throw in the fact that when Fox owned the Dodgers, it tried to do something like this on a slightly less grand scale and it exploded in every Dodger fan's face. I'm not ...

This is likely to be rambling and disconnected. That's what happens when you're reluctant. Somebody called me a "guru" in the comments of the last post. I've also been called "godfather" and "dean" and all those other mighty-might nouns that make me cringe. Let me fill you in on a little secret. I hate being the answer man. As you might know, I'm somewhat of an answer man in real life. I'm a boss. Not one of those big bosses. I'm one of those in-between bosses that gets crap from both sides. There are many days when I question why I ever wanted to be a boss, and there have been days when I've been within seconds of telling my superior that I would rather just write and maybe we could work something out. But still, here I am, being a boss. I think the reason for my issues in this area is that I can't be everything that everyone wants me to be. The people under you want you to do certain things and be a certai...

A couple of weeks ago, Nachos Grande held a break of 2012 Topps minis and I was conspicuously absent. You'd think a guy like me -- as crazy for minis as I am, as dependent on retail as I am -- would jump at the chance of obtaining mini cards that are only available online. Well, normally, yeah. But I already knew that some of the Dodgers from that set were on their way to me. For free. Reader R.C. busted a box of 2012 minis and wasn't all that enamored with them and offered up the Dodgers he pulled. Ever so grateful, I accepted, and now here I am to say ... I'm not all that enamored with them either. But I'll start with the good stuff first. First of all, I appreciate Topps' effort -- whether it was intentional or not -- to make the 2012 set memorable. Not since 1975 has Topps had a mini parallel set of the base set (I don't count 1987 because it wasn't a parallel and, except for the cards you could cut off the box, didn't look like the ...