Night Owl Cards

  Back when I first returned to modern cards, I discovered a brand called Heritage in 2008. It appealed to me instantly and though I've had a love-hate relationship with the brand and its forced short-prints, it's always been one of my favorites.   I didn't need any of the parallels -- the regular set was enough -- but back then there weren't many. There were the chrome parallels and then you could find black-bordered chrome cards as Target exclusives, which were all the rage at the time. I did like those.   Then there were other parallels connected to store-issues -- red borders for Target and blue for Walmart -- that were fun and, again, manageable. Purple chrome hot box parallels, too.   Today, though, I can't even keep track of them all. 2025 Heritage has seen an explosion of parallel cards. While 2024 Heritage had a lot, too, I could ignore them because I love the '75 design so much I don't need a stinkin' parallel. But '25 has even more and I a...

  I'm trying to catch up on a handful of blog series that I've let stagnate for a year or more. You'll probably see a run of these, though I'm not going to publish them all consecutively. I'll space it out pretty good, especially since a couple take awhile to do (a big reason why they've stagnated).   Five years ago I wrote a post about the last card , which was me determining the last card I needed to finish all of my sets. Fueled by recommitting to completing sets in 2019, I listed (and pictured) all of the cards that were the final piece of the puzzle for a bunch of sets.   I said I'd update that post as other completed sets came to mind or were completed. And I did update it with a post one year later and then another post two years later. Then I stopped.   But my set completing definitely didn't stop. In fact it's picked up steam. It has been my No. 1 goal, surpassing my quest for every Dodgers card or landing packs of whatever new set has arriv...

  A couple weeks ago reports came out that Panini America is looking to sell. While this barely causes me to shrug my shoulders, considering its output in the baseball market the last 15 years, it's concerning in another way.   One of the most interested parties in buying Panini is Topps/Fanatics. Topps is interested in Panini's global reach and this would fit right in with Fanatics' desire for world domination. While a sale to Topps would allow some of the brands that Panini made that didn't meet my expectations -- stuff like Donruss and Diamond Kings -- to be retooled into looks I might like better (i.e. have team logos), it also carries the potential for Topps to continue its lazy treatment of many of its sets ... or not publish them at all, as seems to be Fanatics' way.   But what Panini was doing with baseball sets certainly didn't interest me, so it mostly gets a shrug.   I haven't purchased a pack of Panini-whatever in a good long time. The last time ...

(I think Topps/Fanatics has succeeded in curbing my craving for current product. Between the months and months that pass before a new set is released and nothing showing up on shelves regardless, I'm losing my interest for anything that isn't flagship or Heritage. Topps Holiday? Don't care. A&G hasn't shown up yet? Don't care. Thanks, Topps. I'm cured! Time for Cardboard Appreciation. This is the 358th in a series):   I came across this card on social media the other day. It was one of those 1980s cards that I had never seen before, showing a player I had never heard of until that moment. This still can happen with mid-1980s cards when I was apart from the hobby.   Still, it's enough of a rarity that I was stunned. Dave Shipanoff? Who? How had I never heard of him? The first thing I did was look him up on baseball-reference.   I discovered he played for the Phillies just one year in the back half of the 1985 season. He appeared in relief in 26 games, sav...

   OK, so I get it, yesterday's post was a bit of a curveball with no actual cards displayed. That post was more for me than for you, I like to review my writing from time to time (I've had thoughts about examining my writing style on this blog, we'll see if I ever go through with that).   As I've said before, if I wrote nothing except "here are some more cards I got," this blog would have closed down in 2010. I like to mix it up.   But honestly, I am all about the cards when I'm not forced to do something else with my time (i.e.: job, chores, duties, responsibilities, various crises, mind-numbing drives). That's almost all of my free time: cardboard. I suspect it's like that for you, too, if you're tuning into this blog.   So, what the hell, why not show what cards I've added in my free time, under the radar, while I'm writing about magazines or music or whatever the heck else you didn't come here to see? It's a rather eclectic...

  I pulled the latest magazine issue of Beckett Vintage Collector out of the mailbox on Monday and paged through it without any urgency. I didn't have an article due to run, the last of them was in the previous issue.   So I was surprised about three articles in to see my name on a story about the 1954 Topps set. By golly, I did write that! More than a year ago!   I had figured that this one wasn't going to run. That happens sometimes, it happened to one of my articles once before. And being a writer and editor for a newspaper, I understand how that goes. Sometimes the article doesn't fit, there are too many other articles that are more timely or have better art or whatever. Or, heck, maybe the idea just isn't solid. I'll acknowledge that with this one, it wasn't one of my better ones.   But I was happy to see it in print. I've now appeared in the last three Beckett Vintage Collector issues, which had never happened before (there won't be a fourth straig...