Night Owl Cards

One of my favorite blogs, Dinged Corners, hasn't posted in a week. It's my hope that they're doing something delightful: vacationing, obsessing over the Olympics, or journeying to their favorite spring training site. But, like dayf , I'm going to try to draw them out anyway with a direct DC reference. It's time to play the 6-in-30 game. This is the DC brainstorm where you pull six cards that make you happy, but take only 30 seconds to do so, or thereabouts. Mine was more "thereabouts." I pulled six-ish cards in a minute and 30 seconds. I went directly to what I call my "vintage binder." This is a binder with sets that I have not reserved for their own separate binder because I don't feel I have enough cards from the set yet. I have several of these kinds of binders, but the "vintage binder" is special because, duh, it's all vintage. I'll start with one of my favorite cards from the 1969 set. I like it when the design...

When you were a kid, what was the oldest baseball card that you had ever seen? Not the oldest that you ever spotted in a book or a magazine, but the oldest you had held in your hands, whether it was card you owned or not? For me, it was a 1971 Topps Manny Mota. Not the one pictured here. This is a lovely updated model. The one that I saw was literally lying in the gutter. I was walking home from school one day and I saw it crumpled along the road side, trembling, injured badly. I picked it up gently. It was in terrible shape. Creases and folds everywhere. Parts torn off of it. I took it home, and bandaged it in Scotch tape, but I could do nothing for the gaping hole in Mota's midsection. So I just slapped some more tape on it and hoped for the best. That Mota card survived, and it lasted a long time in its shoebox home before I bought this new one. Back then, to me, the 1971 Topps set was the most ancient set I ever knew. It was so OLD. Only my friends' older (and meaner) brot...