Trade with Night Owl

I grabbed a few Dodgers for Trade Bait and Greg from “Night Owl” was the first Dodgers blogger/collector to jump in on a few of them.  We’ve traded a few times, you can check out previous ones of the trade page over to your right.  Although, I am seriously lacking on updating that page.  Add it to the list of stuff I’d like to get done here.  But back to the trade, this was just a small one, I sent him a few, he sent me a small stack.  He’s like that, just a great trader.  Here are the highlights that he sent me.

An alcoholic refractor, although scanned, it almost looks camouflaged.  But I like all the sparkly in this years sets.  A couple of Orange refractors, a couple of A&G, one being a code card.  An update of a previous Sox, guess he needs a new update card now.  And an insert of Chris Sale.  What’s best is this isn’t all Greg sent me and he sent a bunch of Sox I didn’t have.  I, like most of you, like the colored refractors.  I believe these are my first of Topps Chrome.  I have an Orange Gordon Beckham, but I’ve had it awhile so I’m pretty sure it’s not Topps Chrome from this year at least.  As always, an outstanding trade with Greg.  I’d plug his blog (Night Owl) to you all, but let’s face it, I’m willing to bet if you read baseball card blogs, you read his.  It is the best card blog out there.

What to do? Or did I do it? I’m lost. Well, not really.

Hiflew over at “Cards from the Quarry” posed the question, How do you store your team’s cards?  Great question, and I enjoyed reading all the answers, check the post out here to read the comments.  I think I had decided to change the way I store mine, I can do that since my collection isn’t all that huge yet.  I had thought about doing it by player because there are so many players I really like and would like to see all their cards together, but I don’t want to start player collections of those players.  So this would be the next best thing.  I’m looking forward to seeing all my Aparicio’s on 1 page as well as some other players.

As I started thinking about how I was going to do it, I remembered the way I collected as a kid.  I had the pages alphabetically by last name.  If you know me, I have to have rules.  My rule was a player had to have so many cards before he got his own page.  Of course, I don’t remember that number at this moment.  I’m thinking 3 or 4 cards for the player.  When I was a kid, I had all the other cards at the back of the book.  This time I think I’ll put all the players in accordance with the letter.  All the A last names after the A pages, ect.

I have my plan, I have set my rules, now coming up with the time to take them all out of the pages and back in will be the problem.  Sounds like a weekend project.  Problem is, my weekend is booked.  They posted Saturday and Sunday at work but I already had plans on Sunday so I told the foreman to mark me as a call in.  I never miss work, so it wasn’t a big deal.  I’ve called in once in the last couple of year.  But on Sunday, my wife and I are taking my kids to a huge Lego Train display towards Chicago.  My son (7 yrs. old) loves Lego’s and I can’t wait to see his face.  They know the city we are going to, I haven’t told them what we are going to see.  Anyways, hopefully I’ll find some time to at least get it started this weekend.

I’ve mentioned a few times here that I was thinking about set collecting.  While I know I would enjoy buying packs and trying to collect a set, I simply can’t afford to buy packs all the time.  If I could afford that, I would be buying packs anyways just because I enjoy sorting through a pack to see who I got.  I’ll admit I look forward to getting a hit as well, although it doesn’t happen as often as I would like.  If I had to collect a set this year, I probably would have done Lineage.  I liked the mix of modern and vintage stars, and I liked the inserts.  But what I really love is vintage.  I’ve always said I was going to decide between 1973 (my birth year) or 1981 (1st year I collected).  While I haven’t officially decided to collect either of those years, I did kind of take a small step today.  While at work, I added a saved search for both 1973 Topps and 1981 Topps on my ebay app.  I used the advanced feature and set the parameters at $1.00 or less shipped.  While I haven’t bid on anything yet.  I feel I’m being led to start picking up the cheaper cards here and there, when I can.  I’m pretty much starting from scratch on both sets, the only cards I probably have are in my White Sox collection.  I take that back, technically, I bought my first 1981 Topps today from Kyle at “Juuust a Bit Outside” blog.  He’s selling off some of his unwanted cards 5 for $1 with a $2/minimum.  I browsed his gallery and selected 2 White Sox cards and a Tom Seaver for myself and since I needed 10 cards, I needed to pick 7 others.  So I grabbed a Chad Henne card that I think I might already have, but I may not as he had a couple of cards in the set.  And also a 1981 Mets Future Stars.  Then I picked out 5 cards of other teams that I tend to trade with.  So I guess technically I started collecting sets.

For the record, I’m not asking anybody to send be their 1973’s or 1981’s.  I’m just going to pick at these sets with no real timeframe for completion.  If we make a trade and you want to throw a few in, great, I’m certainly not going to complain.  But I don’t have a lot to trade with right now so I don’t want everybody to send me theirs because then I’m going to have to buy cards to send back.  And with Christmas approaching, I am flat ass broke and can’t afford to really buy much of anything.  As an example, Monday night I went to my LCS while I waited for my daughter to finish with Girl Scouts.  And I didn’t buy anything, nothing, nada.  Of course, nothing really hopped out at me either so it wasn’t really to hard so I guess I can’t pat myself on the back too much.

For the record, I have decided to blame “Night Owl” for this endeavor.  Since he finished his 1975 Topps blog and isn’t starting his 1985 or his 1971 blog’s until after the new year, I had to find other sets to get fixated on.  Thanks Greg, thanks a lot.  Your lucky I haven’t given my wife my new password, she’d probably go into my word file with all my trade partners addresses and send you a mean note.  And forbid me to play with you anymore and then where are you going to send all those Sox cards, huh, did you think of that?

Sorry, got a little off track there.  So to paraphrase.  I’m collecting 1973 and 1981 Topps, but not really.  Don’t send me any 1973 or 1981 Topps, unless you want too.

    

Bye guys!  Thanks for the memories.  Next years going to be a rough one.

Trade with Night Owl

I had posted some Lineage mini’s that Night Owl had wanted so he had contacted me about a trade.  If you know Night Owl, and most of us do, he loves the 1975 Topps and in turn, loves the new Lineage mini’s that look like the 1975’s.  I love his blog, both of them.  “Night Owl Cards” is great and you can tell he puts a lot of time into his posts.  They are humorous and informative, and he shows lots of cards.  And I’ll be sad because “75 Topps (it’s far out, man)” is about done but he says he’s going to start a new set blog after a small vacation from doing 2 blogs so I’m looking forward to seeing what set is up next.  I love baseball cards for the players, because I love baseball.  Night Owl loves the cards, he shows me things I didn’t even realize were there.  He’s way more observant with them than I am.  Which is why I love his posts.

But back to the trade, he sent me a stack of White Sox cards.  I won’t show you everything, they were all appreciated, but most of you won’t care about those.  Here were my favorites.

All these will go to my Konerko Collection.  I really like the A&G mini, I hadn’t seen any of these in person yet as I didn’t buy any packs of A&G.  Not a big fan of the set, too much crap that’s not basball.  I do like the baseball cards in the set, just not everything else.  So I always appreciate A&G in trade packages.  I might have the first 2 SP Authentic in my Konerko Collection but even if I do, they can go into the White Sox Collection.

A Gavin Floyd 2010 Topps Chrome Refractor.  I, like a lot of you, like the Chrome’s but I don’t have too many of them.  I like this 2009 UD Spectrum, you can see the purple in the scan so I’m guessing it’s a purple parallel but I don’t know for sure.  I haven’t taken the time to investigate it, but either way, I like the card.  Not so sure Carlos will be with us next year, but he was good for us, when he could stay healthy.

 

And Night Owl was nice enough to send me this beauty.  Mark Buehrle (who is my favorite pitcher on the team) relic from A&G.  I love these framed mini relic cards but I don’t like the empty spaces between the mini and the frame and between the mini and the swatch of jersey.  I’ve seen others where they are all tightly together and I like those better.  But I still like the cards, I like the outside frame.

 

So a big thanks to Night Owl and be sure to check out his blogs if you haven’t already. “Night Owl Cards” and “75 Topps (it’s far out, man)”.  If you’re a card collector than I know you’ll love both off them.

Trade with Night Owl

My 2nd trade post of the weekend is with “Night Owl”  I reached out and sent him some Dodgers cards and he had sent some cards in return.  I had actually e-mailed 2 Dodger fans about possible trades before I had realized it so I had to break my Dodger cards in 2.  Sorry guys.  Here’s the highlights.

Love, love, love the vintage.  Without looking, I want to say those are all firsts of those years and sets, except the 1981 Topps.  But I certainly don’t mind that card either as it was my starter set back in the day.  Sportflics, awww, I remember how cool those were back in 1986.  Plus a couple of cards of some White Sox broadcasters with Beltin’ Bill Melton and Ed Farmer.  And a current base coach in Harold Baines.

And of course, another vintage feel card with the Fisk and I believe the Jenks is my first O-pee-chee card.  Really like the look of the Masterpieces as well.  All in all, another great trade from another great blogger.  Check out the “Night Owl” blog.