Night Owl Service

I'm a subscriber.

With this post, I am officially caught up with all incoming card-related packages for the first time in what has to be years. It seems like years, anyway. And what better way to commemorate this occasion than with some cards from my most frequent mailbox visitor, Night Owl Cards. One of these days I'm going to compile a list of links to everything he's sent. One day... maybe the next time I'm caught up?

Night Owl sent a healthy stack of this year's Heritage cards, which is great as this is the time of year that I start getting tired of looking for Heritage to open. Altuve is a short print in the set as well as one of Erin's guys to collect, but this one I'm going to keep (shh!) since it's hard enough as it is to get ahold of Heritage SPs. Also, Altuve has about a million different cards in this set when you consider all the inserts and variations.

Here's a much loved 1975 Lou Brock Hostess card. I understand there are Twinkie and non-Twinkie versions of this card. I don't see a Twinkie logo anywhere, so I'm gonna go with non-Twinkie.

I kind of miss the old Target red parallel cards now that they're gone. I know that they're just another annoying side distraction that you're never going to collect all of before you die, but the red look always looks good on Redbirds.

I'm a little disappointed that Topps used the same photo for this card as the Pujols 1st Home Run card, but I bet they have to pay some sort of per-photo fee for archival photos. (Side note: does anyone know when they started completely outsourcing their photography to Getty Images? They used to employ their own photographers at one point, didn't they?)

Ah, Kolten Wong's golden home run trot.

And here's a shiny gold low-numbered autograph of the Cardinals young reliever with the funky name. We saw bits and pieces of Tuivailala this past season, but I am guessing he will figure more prominently into the team's bullpen plans in the future.

As a bonus, Night Owl included some laminated lanyard/credentials/backstage passes/whatever from some prominent sports card conventions of the past. I haven't been to any such things before. My card shows are usually very local and homely, if you ask me.

So they used to have a night owl service for our public transit bus system back when I was a kid. I'm not sure why it went away... perhaps things are just too dangerous on the streets of Portland these days, or maybe drivers were falling asleep at the wheel. Whatever the reason, I feel like there's no excuse good enough to shut down something that keeps potential drunk drivers off the road. Bring it back, TriMet!