Night Owl Cards

(Hi folks. I'm two work days away from vacation! It's all I'm thinking about. So let's get on with this so I can think about it some more! Time for Cardboard Appreciation. This is the 353rd in a series):    I don't remember how I discovered this Hideo Nomo card -- probably wandering on ebay at some point -- but when I did, I could feel myself jump in my chair from astonishment.   What? Hideo Nomo is back in Topps products?? When did this happen?   Nomo is one of my favorite players to collect -- ever. There are lots of past posts about that. But he hasn't shown up in cards pretty much since he retired. Outside of some faceless Leaf relic cards a few years ago -- and those really aren't cards -- there's been nothing. Lots of Ichiro and, lordy, too much Hideki Matsui, but no Nomo.   Obviously I had to have this card and I jumped on it. And I was giddy when it arrived. I showed it off so proudly (and I've been doing less of that lately). But something a...

  Clayton Kershaw should reach 3.000 strikeouts tonight in the Dodgers' game against the White Sox. That's provided that he lasts more than two or three innings, but he's been doing pretty well since his return off the injured list, so chances are good.   Kershaw will become the first Dodgers pitcher -- who is known as a Dodger pitcher -- to achieve the milestone while a Dodger. There have been other pitchers who either started with the Dodgers and reached the milestone with another team or pitched briefly with the Dodgers and reached the milestone but are not commonly associated with the team.   Don Sutton, Pedro Martinez and Greg Maddux all pitched for the Dodgers but struck out their 3,000th batter with someone else.    In one case, a pitcher hit the 3,000 milestone while with the Dodgers, but is more well-known as a National or a Tiger or a Diamondback or even a Met.     In fact, Max Scherzer is the most recent pitcher to reach 3,000 strikeouts. It...

  Hey, it's July. My favorite month. Maybe I can celebrate by surpassing the record-low number of posts I made to this blog last month.   I never would have figured that June would be the month with my lowest total ever. If I had to guess, it certainly would be March. But I posted just 12 times last month, four less than my previous low, which was in May 2019 when my mom passed.   Nothing happened in June nearly as tragic as six years ago but just a firestorm of everything: multiple writing assignments outside of this blog, constant vehicle issues, the present job schedule and this past weekend, in which I went out of town for my nephew's graduation.   It's the final high school graduation for all the nieces and nephews. All done. Probably no high school graduations again unless I make it for a grandkid's ceremony. While I was in Buffalo, I made sure to return to Dave and Adam's.     I never spend too much time around the clothing, it's all too expensive, e...

   The hits keep on coming. Still crazy busy here, as soon as something is resolved, more shows up -- "Hello! Deal with me!!"   I'm not going to get into it all. I do that too much and, well, there's not enough time to bore people. So, hey, here are some relatively recently arrived cards that I'll bang out in hopefully a few minutes!!   Dennis at Too Many Verlanders graced me with a surprise envelope a couple weeks (or more?) ago. Much appreciated. So much that among the chaos I frantically looked for some cards to set aside for him once things blew over. I came up with one card. It's been staring at me for days. Obviously not the time for that. But it's a nice card!     I'll start with the best card from what I needed. It's a 1998 Leaf Fractal Materials something-or-other that I'm still trying to decipher, obviously a riff on his 1993 Leaf rookies card. The card looks shinier in person, sorry for the dull picture. And it's numbered to 3,2...

   In early May, I realized that it had been a long time since I had even looked at the baseballcardstore website .   In the past five years I've made purchased from there two or three times a year. It's a great place to find cheap cards and there's been the bonus of Steven sending cards my way just because or producing made-to-order Dodgers packages for me to grab at my convenience.   But as the site grew more popular I found less and less of interest. All the good stuff seemed to be snapped up right away. And there was another Dodgers super-collector who had discovered the site who was grabbing anything I wanted. Eventually I just stopped checking it out.   When I realized that it had been a year since I had placed an order I resolved to find stuff that fit my collecting interests. If I really tried, it shouldn't be that difficult. I like a lot of stuff. And the cards are cheap, so make an effort, night owl!   It took awhile -- so little time to devote an...