Night Owl Cards

I enjoyed Cardboard History's recent look at the history of chronicling NBA expansion teams on cardboard. I'm not much of a pro basketball fan, but I knew this would be something I could translate to baseball. The way card companies, and Topps in particular, have documented Major League Baseball expansion is something I've always been aware of through the years and it would be interesting to see the progression all in one place. So I looked through my collection and then I filled in the blanks with scans from the internet and I'm now ready to show you how expansion teams were shown that first year of each franchise. Basically, card companies have used four different ways to feature those teams: 1. List the player with his new expansion team but hide the old uniform in the photo and show the player without a hat. 2. List the player with his new expansion team but airbrush the player's hat so the old logo or old team's colors aren't showing. 3. L...

Some of you eagle-eyed readers may have noticed that briefly yesterday, Night Owl Cards featured a gray background. I was tinkering with the layout to accommodate my new logo. I eventually realized that Blogger wasn't going to help me in this area, but I should have known what I was doing was wrong because when have I ever liked gray as a primary design theme? Look at all the sets that I instinctively turn my nose up at: 1983 Fleer, 2017 Topps, 2020 Topps, all gray-based sets. The king of all gray-themed sets is, of course, 1970 Topps. As I've mentioned too many times, I've come around on '70 Topps, from considering it absolutely uncollectible to currently attempting to complete it. I still won't say it's in my top 10 or anything -- I'm basically trying to complete it because it's a set from the 1970s -- but I appreciate a lot of the pictures in the set more than I once did. And let's face it, compared with what's being churned out on ca...