Night Owl Cards

I had a tiny little bit of Christmas money leftover after my junk wax team set binge. It was just enough to grab a couple more cards, so I looked up which team set featured only a couple of wants and settled on a favorite: 1993 Select. I needed just two Dodgers to complete Select, the upscale brother of Score, and now they are mine. Yup, I needed a couple of Erics. I'm very pleased to have another team set from the early '90s completed, but particularly one like '93 Select. I've been a fan of this set from way back on this blog and in the unlikely event that I decide to start completing sets from the 1990s, this will be in the top 5, easily. I've always liked the look. Green sets normally don't do anything for me, but I enjoy the design and it's one of those sets with good photos that are not sacrificed for design. And just as important: it does not sacrifice design for the photos. But without further babbling about my likes and dislikes, her...

I really try not to be one of those people who has difficulty adjusting to the changes that are inevitable with advancing age. As someone who was born in the '60s, grew up in the '70s, went to college in the '80s, and started a family in the '90s, I've seen the world shift a time or two. Sometimes I hop on board and travel along. But there are other times when it is very obvious that I'm too stuck in the past and things happen by which I simply cannot abide. For instance, a couple of weeks ago, the Tampa Bay Rays and Oakland A's completed a trade that sent Ben Zobrist and Yunel Escobar to Oakland. The Rays received John Jaso and a couple of prospects. One of those prospects is named Boog Powell. Yes, Boog Powell. If this doesn't strike you as everything that's wrong with the world today then you're too young to read this post. I don't follow minor league baseball very closely or I probably would have come across this particular f...

(Greetings. Today is Beer Can Appreciation Day. It recognizes the day when beer first became available in cans in 1935. And they say The Depression was a terrible time. Pop open a cold one and appreciate beer in a can AND cardboard. It's time for Cardboard Appreciation. This is the 220th in a series): This is the first Ernie Banks card I ever owned. Well, not this particular one. When I was first getting back into card collecting, a guy I knew at work liked Banks a lot and wanted my 1971 Banks card. Even though the '71 set was a distant collecting goal of mine at the time, I traded it for a bunch of '75 Topps cards, and regretted the deal only slightly. But it was enough regret to cause me to trade for another one not long afterward. This card isn't in as fine of condition as my previous Banks -- it was quite a feat that one of the first '71s I owned was a well-conditioned Ernie Banks card -- but it served my purpose, the set is complete, and I ain't fe...

It's difficult to explain Twitter to those who are not on it. Sure, it can be a time waster. Sure, it's filled with spastic people. Sure, it's not for everyone. But as someone in the media business and someone with a blog, it's a necessity. In my job, Twitter is how we get the word out. We're in the information business, people come to us for it, and more and more people are on Twitter. Ergo, get the information on Twitter! You want to make the daily newspaper relevant to teenagers? Just start tweeting high school scores at them. They'll never forget you. But in my blog, Twitter is where I go for ideas, man. Twitter is an idea factory, there are thousands of conversations producing millions of ideas at any time. A few weeks ago, when a couple of Twitter accounts started discussing "face percentage" on baseball cards, I thought, "hey, that's an idea I had!" Like so: "Face percentage" refers to the amount of territ...

If you have some knowledge about cards from the 1980s -- particularly the most featured cards from the 1980s -- then this card, even if you have no idea who Bob Pate is, probably looks vaguely familiar to you. It is a card that leads to the "Coral Snake Effect". I didn't make up that term. It was mentioned on my 1985 Topps blog by hiflew from Cards from the Quarry . And it didn't have to do with this 1981 Donruss card of Bob Pate, it had to do with this card: Yeah, I know, "who the hell is Keefe Cato?" You've got to read my '85 Topps blog and then you'll know. But this post isn't merely about nobody ballplayers. It's about how these players resemble someone else much more well-known in the set. In hiflew's and Keefe Cato's case it is the Eric Davis rookie card. They don't really look like each other, but they share some other characteristics. They're both Reds, they're both featured cropped at the c...

While waiting and waiting for last night's post to appear on everyone's blog rolls -- the post was inexplicably delayed by Blogger for three hours -- I went through the cards that I had featured, cataloged them, filed them ... and discovered I had five of them already. Heh. Then it hit me. No matter how well you prepare and research, something's going to go wrong. You're going to acquire a card you already had. Blogger's not going to publish the post at the time you scheduled. Despite your best efforts, you're screwed. Planning and preparation merely ensures that there are fewer issues, not no issues. This brings me to my long-ago announced Best 100 Cards of the 1970s countdown. Since I decided I was going to do this, I've kind of lost focus and I still don't know when I'm going to pull this off. But at least there are small spurts of effort interspersed with all of the uncaring. For example, I have researched the cards from one of the s...

Before I go back in time, here is the 2015 Topps Series 1 checklist , which was released today. My quick reaction to it is: Lot of the same stuff we've seen in recent years. ... Kershaw has to stop hogging awards so I can stop collecting those league leaders things with guys I don't care about. ... Oh, look, Derek Jeter is card No. 1 in the set, that will cause people to flip out -- oops, they already did. ... The inserts have card numbers (instead of letters) on them again --- weeeeee! ... The first-pitch insert is interesting in a D-list celebrity kind of way. But real reaction will have to come when the cards hit store shelves near me. Right now, today's excitement came in the haul that arrived at my doorstep this afternoon. I made it a mission to clear out as many junk wax-era Dodgers sets as I could. I have no desire to continue chasing cards from this time period. It's not particularly memorable for me and the cards are far too plentiful for me to still n...