Night Owl Cards

   Yesterday, Shohei Ohtani hit his 30th home run of the season, and became the seventh Dodger to hit 30 home runs in three straight seasons.   There was some online fanfare for the feat, but it's more muted these days for Ohtani, not like his first few years in the league when Ohtani hysteria was high and I almost had to cover my ears with all the yelling.   Ohtani has been in the majors for nearly 10 years now and that'll happen. He's not the new thing anymore, even while he continues to do new things. But I think along with that, ever since he came to the Dodgers, people are more reluctant to sing his praises. There may be more Ohtani fans than ever, but there are an awful lot of brain-dead gambling jokes from Barstool acolytes and grumbling about deferred money to go along with it. I seem to read about that more on social media than any cool thing Ohtani has done.   It causes me to wonder where all the Ohtani fans went -- I'm still seeing his cards sell for ...

  I could cite several factors that led to my beginnings as a card collector.   - In the summer of 1974, I was playing baseball in the backyard with my brother and a couple of boys in the neighborhood. We played with a tennis ball because regular baseballs broke windows and dented siding (or so we were told). It's possible we were playing ball the previous summer but I'm not sure.   - I was a reader. Loved books and magazines and those Peanuts comic books you could get on loan from the library. I liked stories. I don't recall reading specifically about baseball at that time, I think that came later.   - The 1974 Topps design is ideal for a young collector for focusing on the individual photos. It's not loud like 1972 or 1975. It's not dull like 1970 or 1973. It has fun flags and cartoons on the back.   But those are secondary reasons. The main reason I became a card collector is because of two people.   My mom and Tommy John are where it all started.  ...

  As you know I have another online life aside from the blog world. I've been on "social media" as far as the hobby since 2010, first on Twitter and then in the last couple years on BlueSky.   Social media is weird no matter where you are but I like my online friends I've found over there and it's nice to have a place to show cards that doesn't take an hour of dedicated writing.   Still, it's a weird place. When I moved to BlueSky I tried to carve out the niche I had created on Twitter with more than 4,000 followers. I was figuring out the lay of the land. BlueSky is not Twitter -- and thank goodness for that -- but it's not exactly the hobby hub that the old Twitter was.   In an effort to have something to say -- because, brother, I don't care about most of the stuff that is discussed that isn't cards -- I posted a "late night card of the day" from my collection. Just a random card, uploaded after midnight. I have a lot of cards -- w...

  I don't spend a lot of time checking how many cards I have of each player but it's fun to do from time to time.   As someone who collects sets first and then my team, player collection totals are a natural subset of those and easy to categorize on TCDB or on whichever favorite counting spreadsheet you prefer. Also, unlike set or team collecting, the totals change fairly often.   When Johnny's Trading Spot sends out one of his "inventory cleanser" packages, I can't help but notice those player totals because the guys he's scrapping stand out.   Alex Verdugos   Up to 87 cards. 153rd on the list.     Dalton Rushings   43 cards. 471st on the list.     Tony Gonsolins   75 cards. 189th on the list.     Walker Buehlers (still haven't come to terms with his Padre-ness)   287 cards. 20th on the list.     Duke Sniders   318 cards. 16th on the list.      Shawn Green and (tiny) Fernando Valenzuela...

   Someone on social media posed the question the other day regarding Rickey Henderson's domination of the American League stolen base title during the 1980s.   Henderson led the AL in stolen bases every year from 1980 through 1991 except for one.   The question: who led the league in stolen bases the year Henderson did not?   I had no idea.   I was on top of that stuff during the latter half of the 1970s and early 1980s. That's because baseball cards were there for me, specifically league-leader cards. I've mentioned many times how I relied on baseball cards to tell me important facts from the previous year -- league leaders, postseason results, records broken, etc. I went to cards before the newspaper or TV.   That's how those facts entered my head and stayed there. If someone asked me who led the American League and National League in batting average in 1977, all I needed to do was picture the '78 League Leader card with Dave Parker and Rod Carew on...