Night Owl Cards

  These are bizarre words for me to write but this year marks 50 years since I first held baseball cards in my hand. Those cards were 1974 Topps baseball cards. Had Heritage not been so scared to begin with Topps' first real baseball set when it kicked off the brand in 2001, we'd be celebrating my 50 years with the '74 design in Heritage. Full circle! But Heritage has been out of kilter ever since and I need to take a time-out every time I try to figure out which set Heritage will be replicating in the 2030s when it should take milliseconds. Heritage did the '74 thing last year and the design means so much to me that I completed the whole thing despite last year ending in a "3". It's such a classic set that I started with 50 years ago -- even though I chucked those cards at the end of the summer. I used the Eddie Leon card as a post-topper once before, quite awhile ago (I like that post , most of what I wrote in there still applies). It's one of those ...

  I don't know what the weather is like in your area but around here, it's pretty warm pretty early. It's 85 today and that's not typical in May in the north country. I quite like it but I know if it's like this nonstop through the end of September there is going to be a whole lot of whining around here. And speaking of whining, what a weird time to still be playing hockey. I know that the Stanley Cup playoffs have been stretching into June for decades now. It's played some portion of the final series in June since the early 1990s. Not the first time this Gen-Xer looked at some new occurrence from the early '90s with puzzlement (although nothing will ever top Color Me Badd). When I was in high school, the NHL was done by mid-May. Part of that is because the Islanders were sweeping everyone out in four games, but it seemed in sync with the calendar and the season. It's so hot to be playing hockey in June. It's probably nice for people in Florida, Dall...

  I've been meaning to follow up on a couple of posts and the longer I've waited, the more follow-ups I've added. I'll write about all of them now, but I'll try to keep it from going on for too long (not that I've cared about that in the past!)   Starting with the card show I went to last weekend, I mentioned on that post that I had acquired the 1967 Topps Carl Yastrzemski card, which allowed me to replicate the 1975 Topps '67 MVPs card that shows the Yaz card and the Orlando Cepeda card side by side.      Like so. But I didn't realize at the time that I had picked up another card at that same show that allowed me to complete another MVP card in that same subset. It's the 1969 MVPs card.   And here they are: I had the Killebrew card already and got the McCovey card last week. Not sure how I missed that. Completing these two MVP card matches made me go through the whole subset run to see what I had finished already. I have all the cards that make up ...

  I noticed on baseball-reference the other day that Buzz Stephen had died recently.   The name vaguely rang a bell but I wasn't sure why. It turns out I had just come across his name while working on the latest One-Card Wonders post for this blog. That's life in my addled state, a name that sounds vaguely familiar isn't from 40 years ago, it's from the last couple of weeks.   I was going through the 1970 and 1971 sets to find players who appeared in those sets for their one-and-only card. I wanted to include 1972 as well, because each of these sets are large and I wanted to see if there were more one-card wonders in these sets (I've done 1969 already, another large set, but it produced a rather small total of five). But I ran out of time for '72.   Stephen is one of five one-card wonders in the 1970 set -- so same total as '69. Somewhat unexpectedly, he's the only Pilot OCW, although on further thought a team with such a limited history would have playe...

  When I first started blogging way back when, I was amazed not just by the size of my new blogging buddies' collections, but also their ability to continue acquiring cards and also distributing those cards at will to fellow collectors. I knew only my tiny card world, which mostly remained the same since I was a child. I never had that much money to spend on cards. At first, it was whatever I could save up from my allowance, then it was whatever I could save up from my newspaper route, later it was spill-over cash from part-time jobs. I then took on a career that is renowned for paying squat and that's how I've survived in the hobby, carefully budgeting what I can spend on cards. I perhaps have more money now than ever to spend on cards at this stage of my life. But I behave as if I'm still counting quarters before biking to the drug store a couple miles away. And I remain amazed at what other collectors seem to have available. Without being able to view their collectio...