Night Owl Cards

  Here we are: One of the years of my past that is lost in the black hole of time and continuing memory loss. 1996 will be known to me for two things: the year I bought a house and the year the most hated boss of my life left town. Aside from a few assorted song favorites (Oasis, Garbage, Smashing Pumpkins, you know the ones), that's all I can recall. But what about the baseball cards? Yeah, about that. 1996 was also the first year I did not buy a single card since the time I knew what a baseball card was more than 20 years prior. So, how am I supposed to evaluate the cards from this year? I sure don't feel qualified. I've said this for the last couple of editions for this series. The enthusiasm is low. And in typical '90s fashion, the cards make it difficult. How do I trim it down into something manageable and coherent? For 1995, I limited the sets I was reviewing to only those that could muster 500 cards in their set. But in 1996, Topps pulled a fast one and issued a ...

I'm probably not going to be able to do something like this on the 4th of July, so I need to take advantage of my patriotic holidays while I can. It's Memorial Day. The flag is out, the street is blocked so the parade can go through, and everyone will be eating barbecue and pie later while I'm working. I'm trying to keep away the cranky by making a list, which has been a tried-and-true tactic in behavior control since I was a youngster. I thought it might be nice to try to find the most patriotic baseball card sets ever made and then do a countdown. But of course before I do this, I must have rules. Arbitrary rules is another technique that helps me forget about things I can't have, like three-and four- and five-day weekends. The rules in this exercise are: no insert sets or subsets allowed. There are several flag-flying insert/subsets, like the Collector's Choice card featured here. But I want these sets to really go all the way with their patriotism...

Continuing with the theme of "subconscious collecting," or what someone so crassly described as "hoarding,"  are the players I accumulate who have the most tenuous of connections to me. One of those players is Tim Wakefield. Wakefield rose to fame as a knuckleball pitcher for the Red Sox, and previous to that for the Pirates. Many people also know that Wakefield started out as a hitter. He was a first baseman before realizing he had a better shot at the majors if he took the mound with his baffling new pitch. The embarrassingly suspect connection to me is that Wakefield played his first season of professional baseball -- as a first baseman -- for the New York-Penn League Class A Watertown Pirates, who played their home games a few traffic lights from where I now live. I didn't even live in Watertown when he played in the minors. I was still in school. And, although my newspaper often interviewed former Watertown Pirates and Indians who moved on to bi...