Night Owl Cards

It's been difficult for me to get into this year's baseball season. I haven't watched all that many games and when I do, I am easily distracted. There are a few reasons for this. The weather's been awful this April. How can I think of spring things? Also, the Dodgers, the team that motivates me to follow baseball each night, have started very slowly. You can blame that slow start on a variety of factors, but I'm going to blame it on something nobody in their right mind would blame it on: the Dodgers have played the Giants 147 times already this season. OK, they've played the Giants only 10 times. But considering that the Dodgers have played just 27 games and play the Giants only nine more times the rest of the season , that's way too much viewing of that electric pumpkin color way too soon. I know I should be fired up when the Dodgers play their rival, but it's too much overload too early. It doesn't help that the Dodgers haven't playe...

A couple of weeks ago I was observing the nonstop Shohei Ohtani babble on everyone's favorite/most-hated social media platform and it made me wonder when I would land my first Ohtani card. I guessed it would be sometime around October. I don't pursue the newest rookie sensation each and every year. I don't rush out to find packs of Bowman. I haven't been in a card aisle for weeks and it could be several more weeks before I visit again. So, October sounded about right. There will probably be a dozen Ohtani cards in Topps Update, I'll pull one of those then. Well, the funny thing about saying things out loud -- or typing them out loud -- is there is always someone listening. So, when I arrived from out of town a few days ago, there was a package waiting for me from Marc at Remember The Astrodome . Amid all of the Dodgers goodness that fell out of the envelope was the above Opening Day card of 2018's poster boy, Shohei Ohtani. Mark it on your calendars. ...

I mentioned once before that 2018 marks the 25th anniversary of the 1993 Upper Deck set, what I consider UD's crowning achievement. I think there should be several online tributes to this set this year but so far I seem to be the only one. Sometimes the hobby doesn't do a great job of recognizing the past even when it's all about the past. It probably doesn't help that Upper Deck can't do anything about its baseball anniversaries because it screwed itself out of a license a decade or so ago. But that doesn't diminish what UD did in 1993, which was issue a mammoth 840-card set filled with captivating photography and fun-filled inserts, most of which were contained within one of the best designs UD ever produced. I thought it would be appropriate to recognize that set again (it probably won't be the last tribute to '93 UD I do this year) with a Joy of a Team Set post. And what better way to remember the set than to display all of the Blue Jays ...

I was never in a hurry to grow up when I was young. Even though I was assigned a number of odd jobs around the house by my parents, I didn't have any desire to go out and find "a real job" when I was a teenager. I made several half-hearted efforts but was actually hoping that I'd be turned down every time. My first job in which I was paid by someone other than my folks was as a newspaper carrier, i.e., paper boy. Except I was 15 at the time of landing that job. It was the morning paper (we had "morning" and "afternoon" papers back then). And the first week on the job, I "trained" with the other teenager who was giving up the route. I'll always remember his name, Charlie Sweet. He lived in a big house in a nice neighborhood (I would go on to land extra-large tips from the customers. It was indeed a "sweet" route). I would show up in front of his house at 5:30 in the morning and wait for him to come out so I could f...

I went out of town for a couple of days and while I was there received a bit of bad news with regard to family. I'm not comfortable discussing it here, in small part because I don't entirely know what the news means, whether it's a little bad, a lot bad or some sort of false alarm. But the key thing I'm taking from this news is how important patience is. In general, I'm a patient person, probably much more patient than most people, going as far as it being a detriment in that I can be too patient. But there are times when I don't exercise enough patience. Surprise, surprise, often those times involve cards. Recently, I received a bunch of 2018 Topps Opening Day Dodgers from Matt at Once a Cub . He has busted an entire case of Opening Day, started an OD blog , and had promised to distribute lots of extras to fellow collectors. I wasn't exactly thinking about that though when I was at a card show a couple of weeks ago and started pulling as many D...