This is the first Brooks Robinson card I ever saw. I was into my third year of collecting before I pulled his card. Never saw his tremendous '75 Topps card nor his '76 card. Instead, I pulled his final solo card (excluding the Record Breaker card in '78). I thought he looked old. Too old to be playing. And what was with the card number he received in 1977 -- No. 285? A number ending FIVE? Wasn't he really good or something? I just didn't know very much about Brooks Robinson then. Had I known, and been older, maybe I wouldn't have liked him, him and Frank Robinson and Palmer and all those guys who did a number on the Dodgers in 1966. And, still, I didn't care much a few years later, when my brothers and I went to a card show where Robinson was signing. I was there for the cards, let my brother, the Orioles fan, get in line for Brooks. So he did. I've told this story on the blog before, but it was like 12 years ago and I have other readers now. My broth
I was looking through cards recently when something drew my attention and I thought, "that's a post." Maybe it wasn't a great post, but it was something a little bit interesting to me, and those are all the qualifications here. Through my many years of being a Dodgers fan, my favorite catcher to wear Dodger blue during that time is not Mike Piazza. It is Mike Scioscia. Scioscia was not the hitter that Piazza was, few catchers are. But he arrived during a more impressionable time in my rooting history -- my only experience with Dodger catchers up until that time was the light-hitting Steve Yeager. Plus Scioscia, unlike Piazza, can say he contributed some key hits to a Dodgers' World Series championship cause. But Scioscia's most apparent skill was on defense, calling pitches and particularly the lost art of blocking the plate from oncoming runners. I was gaining an appreciation for the defensive side of the game during those early '80s, so Scioscia