Up all hours talking baseball, cardboard & collecting
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One thing I still haven't been able to get into my head with this blog, even decades in, is that it's my blog. You'd think I'd know that by now. I can post whatever the hell I want on here. I can post about happy little trees or rank rust-removal products or list my favorite Pure Prairie League songs. I can write about anything . But instead I do dumb stuff like avoid showing individual cards that…
I did some light card organizing over the weekend. I moved my 1983 Kellogg's 3-D complete set from binder pages to top loaders, as it's one of the later sets that I'm confident won't crack when confined like that (unlike mid-'70s 3-D sets). I also moved a small stack of 1981 and 1982 Topps stickers into leftover pages I had bought for early '50s Bowman cards. It took me forever to realize that the…
This is the 6,000th post on Night Owl Cards. That really feels weird to type. That is such a big number that I could barely find a corresponding baseball statistic to go along with it, which is what I like to do when I reach a round-number milestone on this blog. I did find one -- career total bases. Just four players in major league history have reached 6,000 career total bases. Hank Aaron is the…
Yay, you're seeing another one of these! As you've no doubt have read already, Chris of The Collector sent out some generous giveaway packages to celebrate a couple of milestones in his collecting life -- 40 years of collecting and 10 years of blogging. Today is the exact day he started his current blog. The baseball card blogging world is more interesting for it. As you know, I love milestones,…
Yesterday, Shohei Ohtani hit his 30th home run of the season, and became the seventh Dodger to hit 30 home runs in three straight seasons. There was some online fanfare for the feat, but it's more muted these days for Ohtani, not like his first few years in the league when Ohtani hysteria was high and I almost had to cover my ears with all the yelling. Ohtani has been in the majors for nearly 10…
I could cite several factors that led to my beginnings as a card collector. - In the summer of 1974, I was playing baseball in the backyard with my brother and a couple of boys in the neighborhood. We played with a tennis ball because regular baseballs broke windows and dented siding (or so we were told). It's possible we were playing ball the previous summer but I'm not sure. - I was a reader.…
As you know I have another online life aside from the blog world. I've been on "social media" as far as the hobby since 2010, first on Twitter and then in the last couple years on BlueSky. Social media is weird no matter where you are but I like my online friends I've found over there and it's nice to have a place to show cards that doesn't take an hour of dedicated writing. Still, it's a weird…
I don't spend a lot of time checking how many cards I have of each player but it's fun to do from time to time. As someone who collects sets first and then my team, player collection totals are a natural subset of those and easy to categorize on TCDB or on whichever favorite counting spreadsheet you prefer. Also, unlike set or team collecting, the totals change fairly often. When Johnny's Trading…
Someone on social media posed the question the other day regarding Rickey Henderson's domination of the American League stolen base title during the 1980s. Henderson led the AL in stolen bases every year from 1980 through 1991 except for one. The question: who led the league in stolen bases the year Henderson did not? I had no idea. I was on top of that stuff during the latter half of the 1970s…
I'm now 50-plus years into my collecting journey. I haven't seen it all when it comes to cards, but I've seen way more than I haven't. That's why the concept of "new to me" means more than it ever has. I love finding cards that are new to me. It's probably why I still buy packs of current product, because they have the best chance containing cards I've never laid eyes on. It doesn't matter the era…
This rookie card of Brooklyn Dodgers pitcher Kirby Higbe arrived the other day. It marked what could be the end of my pursuit of the 1941 Play Ball Brooklyn Dodgers. There are five cards in the team set. I now have four of them. The fifth one has been priced out of most people's ranges. So I'm good with having four of them and calling it complete. As a "glass is half empty" guy in many situations,…
I finally completed my 2025 Heritage High Numbers Dodgers team set yesterday. The Hyseseong Kim card was the last to arrive at the nest. Of course, it's a short-print and is a part of the infuriating way Heritage is acting recently with online exclusives and short-prints and inflated ebay pricing. I also wondered if it would ever arrive. It took exactly a month, from purchase to arrival for me to…
It's getting so that I'm running out of places to turn to find cards that I like that aren't stupidly expensive or unavailable. Modern cards are out in that area. They're seeded with short-prints and often they prevent you from finishing a set. See: 2025 Topps Heritage. Vintage in many cases is out. Thank goodness for card shows, I can still find them there. But looking for cheap vintage online is…
Just a quick observation while I'm dealing with more visiting and various summer activities. I received these two 2026 Bowman cards from The Shlabotnik Report about three weeks ago. They were my first look at this year's Bowman. I don't buy those cards anymore. One of the many reasons I don't is because Bowman has no interest in distinctive designs, which can be attached to a respective year. They…
