Night Owl Cards

  Longtime readers might know that I was diagnosed as diabetic almost 12 years ago. It pretty much floored me, but I went to work right away and within three months I was in remission. At the time I was determined to get myself healthy the natural way without medicine, and it worked. I continued to do that through doctor visit after doctor visit. Warding off diabetes without any pills is not easy. I also did not check my sugar regularly, which has received some blank stares from nurses. It's kind of a tightrope act, I need to be super-vigilante about my weight and what I eat, but the theory on that lifestyle choice is, "that's what you should be doing anyway," so why not? Diabetes gets progressively worse as you age, and I've been coping with holding it off for more than 11 years. I'm not young anymore, I'm more than halfway to 100, and I've noticed it getting more difficult. A couple pounds over can make a difference. I'm no longer opposed to medi...

   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 ...

  One game-changer to writing my own blog was that no cards seemed to be out of my reach anymore.   What had seemed unattainable before was surprisingly doable, thanks to reader generosity and simply the publicity the blog has given me.   I've reminded myself of that blog phenomenon over and over and tried to rid myself of the "oh, I'll never be able to finish that" mind-set that has been my safety net against disappointment in this hobby for decades.   But there are still impossible quests. No one will be able to convince me that they are not.   The main one is completing the 1952 Topps Dodgers team set.   Supposedly it can be done. It's not like one of the cards is a 1 of 1. But it's still impossible to me.   Every collector knows about cards 311-407 in the 1952 Topps set, the high-number series in which many of the cards were off-loaded into the ocean because all the unsold cases were taking up warehouse space. The surviving fourth-series cards, alr...

  I've mentioned I've been chasing O-Pee-Chee Dodgers recently. There are hazards to this activity especially if you aren't paying attention.   I wasn't.   This 1975 Ken McMullen was advertised as an O-Pee-Chee card. I just took the title for its word. Apparently it was my first day on ebay because you can't be doing things like that. The seller even had a photograph of the back, which looked like this:   Obviously, that's not an OPC card. Where's the French? But I ignored that, saw a nifty price and bought it. Delayed disappointment was mine. I will not be buying from jpcardxpress again, especially since I see he's relisted it to sucker someone else. But dumb move on my part. And it ain't so bad because I love my '75 Topps dupes! Anyway, this is the lead-in for another segment of the '75 Topps countdown, where you will see Topps-and-only-Topps cards as you should be seeing! We're into the mid-400s of the countdown, which is mostly some m...