Night Owl Cards

Welcome again to the Night Owl Cards ranking studios. This is the seventh annual edition of "30 teams," my rating of each Major League Baseball team from my most favorite to the most unholy spawn of beezlebub. Once again, I'm always happy when this tradition comes around again because it means that we're not far from baseball, spring, and a world in which I can see grass, sidewalks, roadside curbing, the fence in our yard, the bottom half of sign posts, and the vehicles driving down the street as I crawl inch-by-inch in reverse down the driveway to see out from behind the snowbanks, hoping that this won't be the day when I place a call to the insurance company. But you just go right on visiting your spring training sites. I'll get you back when it's August. Anyway, for this list I decided to focus on rookie mojo. For each team, I found a card that features a past rookie sensation from that team. It was pretty easy to find cards for most of the team...

Long ago, during a year far, far away, Jeff of 2-by-3 Heroes held a "Tis The Season contest in which he was giving away stacks of surplus cards in a variety of categories. I looked at the cards available and immediately targeted the 2013 and 2014 A&G stack as pretty much the only item I wanted. In a case of "why can't be life be like this contest", not only was I selected as a winner, but I got to pick my first choice, the Ginter stack. A short month-and-half later, it arrived at my domicile, and a short two weeks after that, I'm showing my winnings. The best part of card blogging is there are no deadlines. Jeff, was right, the majority of the cards in the stack were 2013 A&G. In fact, since I was fairly close to completing the set even before I won the contest, here are my "extras' of Jeff's "extras": Those are available to whomever would like to make them theirs. I'd prefer sending someone the whole stack, but i...

The checklist for 2015 Topps Heritage came out yesterday and, like always, I search out the Dodgers as well as which ones are short prints. I'm not too enthused about Heritage this year because the 1966 design is another one of the '60s borefests. The yellow-on-red used with the Dodgers (and the Yankees) makes it seem more of a food-issue card than a Topps card ... hey, wait ... maybe the design isn't so bad after all. But I'm also not looking forward to chasing another round of Dodgers short prints. For the fourth straight year, the Dodgers have three or more SPs in Heritage. This year, it's four. I went through the checklist and counted up the SP totals for each team. Here is what I found: American League Baltimore Orioles - 1; Boston Red Sox - 4; Chicago White Sox - 3; Cleveland Indians - 3; Detroit Tigers - 6; Houston Astros - 2; Kansas City Royals - 4; Los Angeles Angels - 4; Oakland A's - 1; Seattle Mariners - 5; Tampa Bay Rays - 1; Texas Ran...

What would you say is the greatest Dodgers team set? There are a few that you could name. The 1952 Topps Dodgers set is the Boys Of Summer, a very desirable and almost impossible-to-complete team set. The 1953 Topps Dodgers set also commemorates the Boys Of Summer but in painted form. The 1955 Topps and Bowman Dodgers team sets came out the year of "Next Year," when the Dodgers finally won the World Series. But neither set is all that it could be because each card company had exclusives with their own players. The 1964 Topps set shows the Dodgers who swept the Yankees in the Series and also features a tremendous World Series subset to underline the fact. The 1975 Topps set colorfully marks the Dodgers' return to prominence as a World Series team. The 1978 Topps set is the one I associate with those back-to-back Dodgers World Series teams, the first teams I watched on television. And the 1982 Topps, Donruss and Fleer sets recall the Fernandomania year. But I t...