Night Owl Cards

Right now the baseball buzz on social media is the World Baseball Classic. While I'm happy to see people talking about more baseball, I can't get into the WBC more than periodic glances. A few reasons just to make sense of how I feel:   1. We just had two weeks of an international sports event. I'm tapped out. 2. March has enough chaos and energy -- March Madness, right? I don't need more. 3. The WBC seems to run on star power, which really isn't my focus in baseball (Yes, I know the Dodgers have a ton of stars, I do feel conflicted about that).   For baseball all I need is the Dodgers and the other MLB teams that play the Dodgers. I have a difficult time getting invested in any other kind of baseball, whether that's Olympic, collegiate, Banana Ball or any of the many, many non-MLB leagues through history. I've found where my heart will reside forever -- as corporate as MLB may be now.   My collection reflects that -- in the pursuit of MLB-themed sets and, o...

 (Woooo, I can tell it's March! I've got so many things going on that I'm misplacing stuff like I'm my absent-minded grandma. Between the weather alerts, birthday preparations, endless playoffs, rising costs, deer running down my street (yes, that's a thing) -- ANYBODY KNOW WHERE MY DERMATOLOGY BILL WENT? Hell, let's go without one hour on the weekend, too. Nobody needs an extra moment to catch their breath at this time of the year!! Squeezing in a Cardboard Appreciation. This is the 366th in a series):   One of the reasons I'm still reading blogs 18 years in is because they continue to offer a wide variety of card subjects and cover them in-depth. Maybe youtube can do that, but who wants to listen to someone blather on about cards for that long?   Blogs are still good for unearthing cards that you didn't know you needed or for reminding you that you still need that card -- we old people who still read blogs are sometimes forgetful.   A couple of weeks...

  I read a story on the wire at work last week about Red Sox pitcher Zack Kelly , perhaps you saw it, too. It ended up on youtube and social media as well.   For Photo Day at Red Sox camp, Kelly wrote a message on the paper that featured his name and number for ID purposes. It said: "5th year in MLB. Can I please have a card?"   Kelly is 30 years old. He has pitched in the majors since 2022. He appeared in 49 games for the Red Sox in 2024. He appeared in 28 for them last year. He has 98 total MLB games. His only cards are from minor-league team-issued sets.     Dan Altavilla has pitched in the major leagues for eight years -- 152 games total. He started with the Mariners in 2016, throwing in as many as 41 games in 2017. He moved on to the Padres in 2020, then played for the Royals and last year was in 28 games for the White Sox with two saves.   He has no Topps cards. His last non-minor league cards were in 2014 with Panini's Prizm Draft Picks Series and El...

    A Pirates account on Bluesky recently featured the Pirates player for which he had the most cards and then put out the question (I'm paraphrasing), "which Pirates player has the most cards in your collection?"   My favorite team isn't the Pirates, so I could only guess. My first thought was Dave Parker, but I knew that wasn't right because he also appeared with the Reds on many junk wax sets that at least equaled the number of Pirates cards I owned of Parker.   This got me curious about the player with the most cards for every MLB team in my collection. So I went to TCDB to crunch the numbers -- which took a few days because TCDB has been crashing like mad lately.   It turns out I was correct about Parker. He's not my collection's most frequent Pirate. But I was in the right era. My most for each team is the product of several factors: the era when I started collecting ('70s), my favorite cards (also the '70s and early '80s), the overproduc...