Night Owl Cards

I do not go along with the crowd. That's well-established. Both in the hobby and in life. For example, I do not take part in sales. This is very un-American of me, because wherever I go, inside of the hobby or out, there is someone mentioning how they "got a deal" on this or that. When I used to work in retail, there were legions of shoppers who'd wait for the weekly circular and then stampede to the mall to wipe out all the sale items before Sunday had ended. In the card hobby, I don't have to tell you it's all about finding a sale. Dollar boxes, quarter boxes, dime boxes, nickel boxes. Finding the best deal on ebay. Finding the best deal on your favorite online shopping site. Each year, my favorite site -- COMC -- announces several different sales. The most popular is the Black Friday sale. At that time of year, there is blog post after blog post showing off Black Friday purchases. But I've never taken part. It's not that I don't lik...

The last time I wrote a post, I led off with a Nolan Ryan card. The last time I wrote an Awesome Night Card post, the topic was no-hitters . And I'm showing a card I received from Johnny's Trading Spot for the second post in a row. I can repeat myself with the best of them. I'm showing this card basically because I've never seen it before and I am fascinated with it, mostly because it's taken me so long to find this particular night card. It contains a lot of things that I love in a card. It captures a moment in time -- Nolan Ryan's sixth no-hitter on June 11, 1990 against the A's. It shows a salute to the fans, a tip of the cap. It comes from that time when satin jackets were the height of cool. You can also see a scoreboard in the distance and that's awesome. And, of course, it all happened at night. The only dorky part is the lettering on the photo that says "No Hit KING". I don't know why "king" is all in caps and...

Earlier today I read a post on Torren' Up Cards about Kenny's blogging disaster in which he spent eight months -- eight months! -- writing up a post related to some cards he received from Johnny's Trading Spot and then accidentally deleted the entire thing. Well ... since we're confessing about stupid blogging things we've done recently while showing cards from Johnny's Trading Spot, I have one. Remember that "Best set of 1991" post I published a couple of days ago? I already published one of those. About cards from the exact same year. Published it four months ago. Even worse, I selected a different "best set" in that post. Welcome senility. I've been waiting for you. I fully expect myself to forget things. That's why I use labels for my posts so I can remind myself on whether I've written something already. But the labels failed me and when I clicked on the "best set series" labels, the most recent post t...

The year 1986 overflowed with wonderful one-hit wonder pop records. "Rumors," by the Timex Social Club. ""Hanging on a Heart Attack, by Device. "I Wanna Be a Cowboy," by Boys Don't Cry. "The Rain," by Oran "Juice" Jones. And "Out of Mind Out of Sight," by the Models. Then there's "The Future's So Bright (I Gotta Wear Shades)," by Timbuk 3, a one-off hit that became so confused as an optimistic eye to the future that it was used as graduation music fodder, as nobody bothered to notice the obvious references to nuclear annihilation. One-hit wonders from Regina's "Baby Love" to Billy Crystal's "You Look Marvelous" to Yello's "Oh Yeah," took our minds off the growing arms race of the '80s. And if you were a card collector, you had tiny pieces of cardboard to forget about the cold war. Even though there were three companies making cards in 1986, there a...

After basically taking the year off from collecting in 1990, I was back in 1991. I collected a lot of stuff in 1991 -- because there was a lot to collect. They blew the barn doors off in 1991. Cards and collecting and hobby people in general would never be the same because of '91. There was no going back. The genie was out of the bottle. Everyone had an accountant. We were all going to be stinkin' rich. And the quickest way to retirement -- in 1991 -- was to buy even more cards. The card companies were there for you. There were no less than nine major card sets in 1991, the most ever. I'm not even counting things like Classic and O-Pee-Chee Premiere. Nine sets to collect. NINE! For the first six years of my collecting existence I was collecting one solitary set and sticking my fist in a cereal box for another. That was it. NINE! The '91 card season is probably most notable for the growth in "premium" sets. Leaf in 1990 spawned Stadium Club and Ult...