Night Owl Cards

  I did this post last year and it got so many "more, more" requests that I'm doing it again this year. As a review, to avoid too much flack for actually daring to root for teams during the postseason for a whole entire post, I went with a "most, oldest, newest" post to recognize the annual October ritual. Yeah, I know I'm a little late. But I planned it like this. I don't know what that thing was that we just saw this week. I'm pretty much discounting the wild card as part of the postseason until they get it fixed. You got to win only two games? And teams that won their division are involved??? If you're going to have some crapshoot round, let the wild card teams knock heads, keep the guys who conquered everyone over six months out of it. Also, please, MLB, start reseeding after each round like pro leagues who know what they're doing.   So now we're at the division series, where things make sense somewhat -- though the Phillies should...

  I'm battling a dying keyboard on my laptop so I've been posting on my phone, both here and on the 1993 Upper Deck blog (new post over there, sorry I can't link right now!)   It's not fun, so posting has been/will be sporadic until there's a resolution. This also comes at a super-inconvenient time because I am working on not one but two Beckett articles this month.   The first one I will finish writing next week (I sure hope it won’t be on my phone). Then I'll start the next one. More on that later.   But first I want to do another Joy Of A Team Set post. I wanted to note another 1970s anniversary. A lot of that stuff happened 50 years ago now, you know.   I've already done a JOTS for the Swingin' A's, it was my very first Joy post. But what about the team the A's played in the World Series that year?   The 1973 Mets barely reached .500 but made it to the seventh-and-final WS game. That was a novelty then but fairly commonplace now with allowing...

  There's sometimes this attitude that custom cards aren't worth buying.   I'm guilty of feeling this way. Sometimes I'll run a search through ebay and automatically turn my nose up at some of the homemade cards that find their way into the results. Did someone just make that? There's no way anyone's paying for that!   I've been conditioned to buy cards created only by professionals. So I have certain standards. But if you have the custom-card-making skills, sure, I'll think about buying one. There's one custom card maker who's made me think long and hard about this. The Nine Pockets blog is not shy about giving away the custom cards he makes. I've jumped on the opportunities plenty of times. The quality is definitely there, and often the subject matter speaks to me. So I've accumulated a small collection of Gregory's Nine Pockets creations. Terrific work. Each one addresses a particular favorite pop culture moment of mine with a p...

    It's amazing what you have time for when you have pages that fit the cards.   Although I loved the 1980 and 1981 Topps Super glossy cards dearly when I was walking or biking to the Greek deli to pick up single-card packs of the stuff back then, they slowly fell out of favor as the years went along.   My patience for collecting cards had grown thin anyway and there was no place to store giant 5-by-7 cards like these. Quite simply, my page game was weak.   So, I ended up selling them all in a garage sale. All of them. Jerry Koosman. Willie Stargell. Mike Schmidt. All gone. And I didn't care.   Move forward about 20 years and now I'm kicking myself for what I did. I could have held on to those shiny, glossy, movie-star-type cards because now I do have the pages!   Awhile ago I finally purchased some four-pocket pages and it's made me so much happier. None of those giant-sized cards are flopping about in a binder pocket or wherever. They're sitting in ...