Night Owl Cards

  More than eight years ago (lordy, 2013 is eight years ago??? ), I wrapped up a series where I looked through the Baseball Card Magazines from when I subscribed to it between 1982-85.   I loved doing that series and was sad when I ran out of issues. But just yesterday I realized I hadn't explored all of the issues that I owned.   The April 1984 issue that you see here I used to kick off the series in 2011. But all I did in that post was make fun of people wrote to the letters section hoping the supposed errors on their cards (some weren't even errors) were going to make them rich.   I didn't bother scanning the rest of the issue like I did with all the other ones to follow. So I'm going to go through that now! It's like when you subscribed to a magazine for a year and they gave you a bonus issue before your subscription ran out!   OK, you saw the cover and what was in store as far as teased articles. Here is another peak with the index at the front of the mag...

If you were blogging around 2008-09, you know about a blog called "Things Done To Cards". It's still going , although it's updated maybe a couple times a year. It's one of those collective blogs in which several writers contribute articles. I contributed a couple a long time ago, I remember I once wrote about how in sixth grade me and and a friend would cut up the 1977 Topps four-player rookie prospect cards to create "mini cards". That's what "Things Done To Cards" was all about -- doing things to cards, whether it's a company encasing a scrap of cloth inside a card or an amateur card artist doodling on an unsuspecting player. Recently, a collecting reader, Joe, who has sent me all kinds of nifty stuff over the years, delivered a random assortment of cards, some that he had saved for me and others he had picked up randomly at card shows and such. A few of the cards had things done to them, although I didn't catch on righ...

I haven't gotten very far on my research of legends players in Topps products over the years. Like most card research, it gets more complicated the more you look into it. Some legends appear only in the base set but other legends pop up in the autograph checklist only or the relic checklist only or the cut signatures checklist only. I still plan to get as exhaustive as I can but for now I'm going to focus on one guy and one year only. I'm happy that Pee Wee Reese is back as a legend in Topps products in 2019. If you've been paying attention over the last few years, only certain legends players show up in products year after year after year. Players like Hank Aaron, Cal Ripken, Sandy Koufax, Reggie Jackson and Jackie Robinson are consistently in sets every year, so consistent that you'd rather never pull another new card of theirs again. But then there are legends players that when you pull their card, you all of a sudden realize that you pulled their ca...