Night Owl Cards

Yes, good people, it's time for a trade post. Don't look at me that way. I've just made it through the most debilitating month of the year -- made even more debilitating this time around by circumstances you don't want me to document. Trust me, you don't. The end results is March ate half of the days off that I usually get during a regular, non-hostile month, turned my general mood from happy-go-lucky to WHAT-THE-F***-ARE- YOU -LOOKING-AT, and I'm quite sure knocked a couple of Marchs off my life, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. So with April and baseball right around the corner, I am spunky and ready to go. Besides, I just got this email the other day: "Thank you for your order 1960-BB-TS1-265-NA Rip Repulski 1 03/29/10 SHIPPED 1968-BB-TS1-277-NA Jerry Buchek 1 03/29/10 SHIPPED 1972-BB-TS1-532-NA Fred Kendall RC 1 03/29/10 SHIPPED" My Million Card Giveaway items be shipped!!! (EDIT: My Million Card Giveaway items  BE HERE!!...

I received this flashback rack pack from madding the other day. You can't see the price tag, but it says $1.29. Thirty-nine cards for a buck twenty nine in 1989. That's 3 cents a card! That's awesome. I'm pretty sure madding sent this to me because Orel Hershiser is peaking through the brightly colored writing. It couldn't have been because he thought I needed some 1989 Topps cards. Because we all know nobody needs '89 Topps cards. As much as the thought of '89 Topps takes me back to a golden, carefree year in my life, the actual cards fail to elicit a response from me. I am numb to them because of repeated trips to a single Buffalo drugstore that caused me to accumulate countless duplicates of Scott Bailes, Moose Stubing and Dave LaPoint. The cards are like the lyrics to a Don Henley song. They have lost their meaning. I sold a monstrous box of 1989 doubles in a garage sale several years ago. Yet I am still accumulating Stewart Cliburn cards. The ...

Interviewing managers is rarely a fun activity. On the good side, managers know that dealing with the press is a necessary evil of their job. So they make themselves available and try to be cordial -- or as cordial as their personality allows themselves to be. On the bad side, managers are not as enjoyable to interview as players. For one, unless they are Ozzie Guillen, there is the whole self-censorship thing. A manager has a team and a whole organization to consider, so he is eternally worried about throwing someone under the bus. And that leads to some very boring, "say nothing" quotes. Another problem is the attitude you get from managers. You can get attitude from players, too, but the manager's attitude is almost always along the same irritating line: "Here comes this guy with the stupid questions who doesn't know as much about baseball as me and I've got to deal with him." This is more apparent when a writer is dealing with a minor league te...

(Yes, I've done some blog remodeling. Glad you noticed. More on that later. But right now it's time for Cardboard Appreciation. This is the 58th in a series): In celebration of a new look, I've decided to feature my favorite subset of all-time. It is the 1968 World Series subset in 1969 Topps. And according to me, it is without flaw. Let us count the ways: 1. A newspaper format. Cards that use newspaper themes kick significant ass. 2. Photos that actually appear to be from the World Series game in question. We all know that Topps sometimes has problems in this area. 3. A great newspaper layout. As someone who has produced thousands of sports newspaper covers, that is a simple, striking layout. 4. Topps follows the headline rules! No split modifiers, no ending top lines in prepositions. The editor is smiling. (Wait -- not smiling anymore. What's with the random semi-colon at the end of the second line?) 5. OK, back to collecting: there is a c...

I hope there really wasn't a question over whether I would cut out those Baseball Cards Magazine reprint cards. Cardboard must be 2 1/2-by-3 1/2. It is its destiny. As you can see, I didn't do the greatest razor blade job on the Rose "repli-card." But I'm long past the day when I'd try to pass this off as the real thing. ... Not that I ever tried to do that or anything. There is the back of the freed Rose card. In case you're wondering, the giant REPRINT replaced a cartoon mentioning Rose's '63 Rookie of the Year award. The edges on the Steve Carlton-Fritz Ackley reprint aren't quite right either. But there's room for further trimming when I'm feeling particularly invincible. Did the Cardinals really wear blue caps with white lettering? No red at all? That seems wrong. Although I'm aware it is an airbrush job. You can see the back deletes any reference to Fritz Ackley. Poor Fritz. His appearance in the 1965 set ...

I don't have anything in particular to say for this post. Yet, "something" compels me to write anyway. In situations such as these, I often go to my folder of scans and pull out those neglected cards that were either part of a half-written post that never saw the light of day, or an idea that never realized its potential. For example, there is this card of George "Shot Gun" Shuba from the '74 TCMA '52 Dodgers set. The intended post likely had to do with his nickname and how great it would be to be featured on a card with only "Shot Gun" under your photo. That is an achievement if I ever saw one. Like almost any card blogger, I would imagine, I had ideas of writing a post about players with the same name. This is Pedro A. Martinez, who pitched for the Padres, Astros, Mets and Reds. I periodically wonder if he ever gets mail intended for the much more well-known Pedro J. Martinez. Perhaps he's received a few letters that end with ...

This is not a post professing my love for an alt-rock chick named "Dusty," although if I ever create a comic book series, the heroine will be named "Dusty Chrome." No, this about my long-delayed discovery of cards at a drug store. Many, many, many months ago, I read about bloggers finding 2009 Topps Chrome for sale at Rite Aid. It made me positively giddy. First, you don't find cards at drug stores very often anymore. Secondly, there  actually is a Rite Aid in my outpost hell. Two of them in fact. However, I've reached the point in my life where my brain resists absorbing new information. It's a fun side effect of turning 40. I've rejected a great many new-fangled items that I have stumbled across in the last couple of years, just because my brain has turned its nose up at them. So months went by and I never even entered either Rite Aid store. Neither of them are conveniently located. One is way on the other side of town. The other has a ...