Night Owl Cards

Topps recently announced that it's looking for collectors to vote for their favorite Topps baseball design for each decade since the 1950s. There is a site where you can go to place your vote . Topps says that the winning designs for each decade will appear in packs of 2020 Topps Series 1. It doesn't go into detail about what that specifically means so I don't know if we're going to see regurgitated reprints of cards from the design, or cards with buyback stamps on them, or actual old cards from those designs (the much preferred option). This is all well-worn territory for both Topps and collectors who obsess about past designs like me. But since I like that stuff, I thought I'd go through each decade and make my selections and post them here for all to see. Also, I'll add some extra stuff like those people do when they're handicapping the Oscar winners and I read it all the time even though I have no idea what the movies are. My votes: 1950s ...

When you've been blogging as long as I have, collecting as long as I have, you come across milestones every year. For example, this year is the 45th anniversary of the first time I opened a pack of cards (1974 Topps). It's also the 10th anniversary of the first time I evaluated Topps flagship on this blog. That happened with the 2009 set. That means I have evaluated an entire decade of flagship. And therefore, I can rank the flagship sets from an entire span of 10 years -- 2010-19 -- which I will do for you now. The best part of this exercise is I can go back into the archives and find what I said when I was looking at the set for the first time ... because I've been doing this for 10 years. So, the rankings for Topps flagship from 2010-19: 10. 2016 This set will always be remembered as the first Topps flagship set without borders. That is not a point in its favor. However, I"m more disturbed by the way they went about the set. The "smoke" e...

It's all in the way you look at it. Like just about everything in life, a repack box can be praised or ridiculed. You can seek out the negative. It's very easy to do, particularly when Fairfield hides the less desirable packs so they are not viewable from the outside. So you could focus on the repack's weak points. It's bound to include a pack or two of some version of the lifeless, metalic-looking Prizm. Grown men in wordless laundry on a set that is from either 2012 or 2013. Who knows? And, yeah, you could emphasize that every repack seems to contain multiple packs of Panini Triple Play, including those useless puzzle pieces. You'll scare plenty of collectors away with that rant. Also, there are lots of packs of cards from sets that either I don't need or don't want, like 2015 and 2016 Topps flagship. The box is filled with collecting incidentals. But I find that after I'm all done opening the repack packs and sorting through what ...

You ever play that game in which you calculate how many years it's been since you were a kid and then take that total and subtract it from one of those years when you were a kid and come up with a difference that causes you to instantly turn off all the lights in your house and hide in a dark corner of your room? Yeah, that's not a fun game to play when you start to hit a certain age. It's been more than 40 years since the 1973 Topps set has been issued. Subtract 40 from 1973 and you're in the Great Depression -- in more ways than one. The only time when this exercise is fun is when it comes to cards. I am combining two recent packages that I received because each of them feature 1973 Topps (I can't have every post being '73s, as wonderful as they are). The '73s were central to the package. But with 1973 at the center, each package contained a card from either side of the spectrum -- 40 or so years after 1973 and 40 or so years before 1973. Now th...

The release date for 2017 Topps flagship is less than a week away. I happen to have that day off and will probably be driving myself crazy that day trying to find it in local stores, which is usually an impossible task. I'm happy that I'm still excited after all of these years -- even though I don't intend to collect the set, even though I already see things I don't like about it, even though I fully plan to mention those things on this blog -- but I wonder if the whole modern card collecting thing has passed me by. For instance, Topps released the checklist for Series 1 today, complete with announcing that Kris Bryant is card #1 in the set, which means almost nothing to me. What does still mean something to me is how later cards in the set are oriented. Once upon a time, card No. 100 in the set meant something. Hank Aaron, Willie Stargell, Mike Schmidt, Mike Piazza, those were the players who received card No. 100 -- for decades. I had to look up who Nat...