Night Owl Cards

I am much more partial to blue refractors than any other color refractor that exists in the Topps Chrome parallel menu. Not only is it my favorite color, but it is the color of my favorite sports team. The Dodgers go spectacularly well with blue refractors. I was particularly happy with the blue refractors from 2007-2012 because the deep blue color selected matched the Dodgers' color scheme (they possess the perfect blue -- not too dark and not too light). That is why I favor blues over any color refractor, regardless of rarity. A blue refractor could lack a serial number and a gold refractor could be numbered to /10 and the more desirable refractor for me would be blue all day every day. Because of this, I've tried to accumulate at least one Dodgers blue refractor each year for the last seven or eight years. And I've been thrilled with just about all of them. (I somehow missed a 2012 blue refractor, quite possibly because I was so irked by the desi...

No card era baffles me more than the late 1990s. Brian from Play at the Plate knows this. He knows I collected fewer cards during that time than any other collecting period in my life. And being the supertrader that he is, he recently sent a PWE that contained nothing but cards from between 1996-2000. In other words, he stuffed the envelope with homework. There is no way I will be able to figure out which late 1990s cards I need and which I don't unless I have a few quiet minutes to myself, alone, with a lamp lit above, equipped with my research materials and binders, with a pencil and paper by my side. Now does that sound like homework or what? It's the only way I can do it. Put a card in my hand from the 1980s and I know instantly what it is and whether I own it. Card from the late '90s? I have maybe a 50 percent chance. Can you hand me that giant research volume on the shelf so I can figure it out? I'll get back to you in a few minutes. So, I had a fe...

A little while ago, I received a package from fellow supertrader Adam of Infield Fly Rule . It's so good to have a destination again for all my spare Rockies cards (and all Rockies cards are spares). In that package, I came across two different topics that I wanted to discuss. The first is how nostalgia can pop up in the strangest places and with the strangest cards. For me, the most nostalgic cards, by far, are cards from the 1970s. So many memories and pleasant card moments from that decade. Cards from other eras hold some nostalgia, too, but I would never expect junk wax cards to produce many fuzzy moments, particularly anything from the early '90s. Those were not great cards, nor great times. So how do I explain the rush of feelings I received when I saw these cards come out of the package?: 1990 Score? Why in the world would anyone get melty over that set? Well, every time I see a few 1990 cards grouped together I am immediately transported to a small colle...

I have wanted a pizza-product baseball card ever since Shakey's Pizza produced a few different sets during the mid-1970s. I had a mild obsession with Shakey's Pizza as a kid. One of the chain restaurants sat next to the Dairy Queen where we went as a family. We'd sit in the parking lot and eat our sundaes or Buster Bars and I'd turn to  look out the back window at Shakey's Pizza. The two places shared the same parking lot! Couldn't we just go over there and look inside? That Shakey's closed down eventually and just the Dairy Queen was left. But later I learned that Shakey's Pizza was producing baseball cards -- albeit far, far away -- and I thought they'd be a nice way to remember that restaurant I never entered. I never did get any Shakey's cards (the above image was pilfered). And there are far fewer Shakey's Pizza restaurants now than there were when I was a kid. And food-issue cards? Well, with the unholy alliance between Topps a...

I am still recovering from my daughter's big birthday bash from yesterday -- it's shocking when you get older how anything slightly out of the ordinary can exhaust you. So I've got just one card for you tonight, but it's a really, really good one. This item arrived from my buddy Dave along with the more modern day cards that I showed earlier. This card is definitely not modern, which is perfectly OK with me. In fact, Dave listed all of the categories where this card fits into my collection. It's: -- Vintage -- Oddball -- Foreign -- Designed like the '59 Topps set -- A night card Sweet! As the PSA label says up top, this card is from the 1967 Kabaya Leaf set. According to Japanese Baseball Cards , this was the first attempt by a Japanese card manufacturer to make an American-style card set. Apparently, these cards were imported to the U.S. and sold through the mail until the early 1970s, and the cards are hard to find in Japan now. Thanks to so...

I am the target audience for the latest version of Wacky Packages -- I am a team collector, I remember the originals -- but I wasn't going to buy any until I found myself in Walmart the other day. At the bare-bones card section, I grabbed a pack of Heritage and looked for something else to go with it. Flagship is out. There was plenty of new Opening Day, but since it looks just like this year's lousy flagship, that was out, too. I even contemplated some 2016 Donruss, but instead grabbed this. If you read the blogs, you know what the deal is here. Topps blended Wacky Packages with MLB products to form a Wacky Baseball set. And although the artwork resembles those familiar, fantastic Wackys of the '60s and '70s, this is strictly Wacky lite. The soul of Wacky Packages -- which is parody, a little satire, and poking fun -- has been removed. I'll show you how. Here is a Wacky Packages card from back in the '70s: It turns a familiar character, the Trik...