Night Owl Cards

(Hello on World Penguin Day. This is the perfect excuse to post a Ron Cey card. But I'm not gonna do that. Because I gotta be me. It's time for Cardboard Appreciation. This is the 255th in a series): All of the Eric Thames autographed cards are gone. Or they're priced way out of your range. All of the parallels from 2011 and 2012, too. Eric Thames is HOT! right now. All of the ebay listings say so. Brewers Power Hitter! Red Hot! On Fire! MVP?? Rare! All of the exclamation points! And question marks, and asterisks, and dollar signs!!!!!!! You can buy 30 of the same Eric Thames card for 65 dollars (but why would you?). After Thames hit two more home runs last night to extend his major league lead to 10, I got caught up in the hype -- in my usual reserved way. I decided to see if I had any Eric Thames cards. I did. This 2011 minor league card of Thames, as a Toronto Blue Jays prospect, is the notable one. Many people are discovering that the Brewers' Tha...

Boy, that's a heavy post title for a Monday, right? I assure you all the title refers to is the fact that I am back to work after a week of vacation. I'd love to buy back my vacation (without giving up any of my salary, of course). But that's as deep as I'm going with this post. This is yet another example of being able to do something with cards that you can't do in real life. You get to buy back cards from the past. Or Topps does anyway. Then Topps goes and plasters a stamp on the thing, proving that nothing in life is the way it should be. But we collectors adjust. And I'm getting a great amount of fun in my attempt to "complete" a buyback version of the 1975 Topps set. I recently received the above Glenn Borgmann card from Shane of Shoebox Legends . It's one of his rejects from his buyback frankenset. I like pestering Shane for his '75 buybacks because I MUST HAVE THEM ALL. Shane added another one, too. This is one of my favor...

I suffered yesterday one of the great misfortunes that can happen to a modern-day card collector. A web browser crash ate my want lists. All of them. They're all gone. I'm not sure how it happened. I was updating the want lists with some cards that arrived in the last couple of days. I closed the file and then returned to my list of posts. That's when I got the rotating "loading" circle and -- wap -- the browser crashed. When I opened the blog back up and went to my want lists page, it was empty. Years of work and 60 years of want lists gone. The Internet Wayback Machine wasn't much help. It could retrieve my want lists from April of last year, but that would mean trying to track down a year's worth of updating and that didn't sound attractive at all. Shockingly, what did sound attractive was starting up my want lists from scratch. So that's what I'm doing. 2017 wants are already up and I've started on 2016. I've also j...

It's difficult to shift gears so quickly after completing a set with so much meaning to me and one known for its challenges. So after yesterday's post , I'm going to remain stay on 1972 Topps and discuss the strangest subset ever made. I've written about the "awards subset" before and mentioned it in passing several other times. But I've never devoted an entire post to it and shown all the cards. So get ready for the only subset that I know of that features no people . The Strangest Subset begins in the fifth series (cards 526-656) with card No. 621 and the Commissioner's Award, misspelled as "Commissioners" Award on the front of the card. The Commissioner's Award at the time went to "the player who best typifies the game of baseball on and off the field," according to the back of this card. This is the only card in the six-card subset that includes all text and no list. As you can see, it was such a new award t...

On Thursday, I completed the 1972 Topps baseball set. This is tremendous news. It is tremendous news in particular for a 9-year-old kid from Upstate New York who had just wandered into a world of baseball and the picture cards that display that sport. He is awe-struck, astonished and, frankly, a blithering idiot. His mind has been blown. The '72 set -- I've said it before -- is the one set that I think of when someone says "baseball cards". To someone younger, the cards may look rooted in the past, wild and crazy, and almost primitive. But that's only because they did not stumble into this hobby during one golden, sun-splashed day in the early 1970s. I saw 1972 Topps cards only in the hands of older kids. And I probably first saw them before I even started collecting. To me, those cards -- that design -- said Baseball Cards. That's what trading cards were supposed to be. That has stayed with me for so long that now when I look at my binder of 1972 Top...