Bring on the Night (Owl)

Winter is here and so are @nightowlcards cards. 

 

Tomorrow is the winter solstice, which means days are going to finally start getting longer again. Things are slowly, slowly starting to look up in the outside world as well. I'm not really here to talk about the outside world, though, I'm here to talk about something fairly meaningless in the grand scheme of things: baseball cards! Specifically, in this space we'll talk about a few cards received from long time blogger and current Beckett Vintage contributor Night Owl Cards. If you're not familiar with the ol' Owl, then I don't know how you ended up here.

Back in September, Night Owl sent me a stack of cards that crossed off a number of set needs, along with a couple of Cardinals cards. Packages that are heavier on set needs than team needs are usually a lot more productive in terms of actually crossing things off of my so-called list, but they're not nearly as fun to talk about. I didn't actually have this Gary Gaetti 1998 Finest card, but I probably would have passed it up if I saw it in a dime box at a show because I could have sworn I already owned it. However, the card I actually owned was Gaetti's "no protector" parallel which is only distinguishable from a base card that someone peeled the coating off of in that the back of the card has a bit of a foil background.

My Turkey Red 2020 quest is still going strong. Did you know that I also collect Turkey Red cards from other years? Night Owl clearly did, as he sent over this 2006 card of flash-in-the-pan Chris Shelton.

Here's a few Allen & Ginter cards from various years. I don't know why Topps went so crazy with the Rocky theme in the 2015 set. Did a new Rocky movie debut that year? I think there's already been a Rocky reboot of some sort, so maybe that's how these things lined up.

Finally, let's check in with the 2019 Topps Heritage set. Night Owl is a Dodgers collector, which you likely knew already if you're still reading this, so it's not surprising that he had extra Dodgers to send my way. Team collectors know the pain of an overflowing box of doubles (or in my case, many boxes.) The Kershaw card is one of the cloth-but-not-quite inserts, and the Maeda is a short print. The package also included the base Kershaw card which happens to also be a short print. Nice!

Stay warm, everyone.