Night Owl Cards

  I joined this hobby, was sucked into it, in the mid-1970s. Not too long into my time in the club, maybe a couple of years, I caught on to the one primary goal of card collecting.   The name of the game was completion, set completion.   That's changed in the nearly 50 years since. Sure, there are still set collectors, but we're a much smaller percentage of the entire collecting scene, unlike when I was a kid, when it was just about 100 percent.   Still, I can't get that goal from the '70s out of my blood. It's there forever. It is THE reason why I collect -- to complete the mission, to finish the set, whether it's a team set or a set set. This is what makes sense to me in the hobby, and no matter how much I try, I still can't fully grasp what the heck other collectors are doing if they're not trying to finish sets. What does it even mean? So, my second Sportlots order of the year arrived recently, the last cards showed up today. Without even thinking ab...

  The Dodgers recognized "The Infield" on Friday on the 50th anniversary of Ron Cey, Steve Garvey, Dave Lopes and Bill Russell first playing together. It seems like they just did that the other day, but I guess 10 more years have gone by since, and, wow, was that fast. That Dodgers infield set the major league record for most consecutive years together and they did it all during my first years of following baseball and the team, from 1973 to the end of the 1981 World Series. I thought I'd take the occasion to look through my cards of each of those players and pick out a few notables for each. Here we go:     RON CEY Total number of cards in my collection: 178 Rank in my collection: 30th Number of autographed cards: 25   Rookie card: 1972 Topps (AL-NL Rookie Stars) Favorite card: 1975 Topps Most difficult to land: 1979 Hostess Most painful card: 1983 Topps Traded   As you could guess, it was tough to choose from my Cey collection, which is easily the most var...

  A couple of comments in my last post, combined with a long-overdue discovery, combined with the mailman apparently not feeling like delivering on my street today, led to this post.   Some folks mentioned yesterday how they skip oversized cards because of the difficulty in storing them. I'm assuming this mostly pertains to fitting them into pages, because you can probably find a box to fit just about anything card-like, unless it's enormous.   I've never shunned non-regulation-sized cards because they don't fit 9 pockets, if I like them, I'll get them, no matter what size. But I understand, as a binder guy, not having a place to store them. I felt that particular collector pain for a long time. Because I didn't have all the different page configurations.   But I do now. I have 2 pockets, 4 pockets, 3 pockets, 8 pockets, 15 pockets, just waiting to complete a mission.   I've shown this binder before, a couple of times. It's what I use to store cards and ...

  By 1983, I had adjusted to the growing number of card products on the market.   That total seems laughable now, but just two years prior there had been just one brand and suddenly I had discovered two selling rivals to Topps in Donruss and Fleer, and somehow I had to collect all three.   Gradually, and even before 1981, those companies were putting other card-type things on store shelves. I found most of them for sale in a deli, which was on the way to the drug store where I bought most of my cards. I don't know what caused us to go into that deli, maybe someone told me, "hey, they sell cards!"   I know the first time I bought cards in that deli was 1980 because that's when Topps issued the large, glossy Superstar Photos, which I ate right up.  The increased competition created more card product in the deli and I bought Fleer sticker packs there, 1981 and 1982 Topps stickers (and the sticker book), the 1983 Fleer Stamps and the 1983 Donruss Action All-Stars. I...

  Last week's Card Chat on Twitter asked collectors a few random questions and the first one kind of put me on the spot.   What is my favorite trading card set of the 2000s?   I searched my head for an answer. I don't often think about what I like from 2000-09. I've been over and over my favorite sets from the 1970s and 1980s. Those are memorized. But sets from 14-23 years ago have avoided my obsessive ranking.   The main reason for that was I didn't return to collecting until 2004 and, with the exception of one set, had no idea about any modern sets until 2006. It took until 2008, when I started reading card blogs and starting one of my own, that I got a handle on everything on store shelves.   So to finally give some attention to this decade that I've given the others, I'm ranking my favorite Aughts sets. Many of these sets I've completed -- because I like them. I've discussed many of them here, too, so they shouldn't be a surprise. Here they are:...