Night Owl Cards

  I picked up some manager cards last month in a Twitter sale (I've decided I'm going to call that site "Twitter" until it dies). They were all from a period when I was not collecting, 2001 and 2002.   The 2001 ones are above, if you're as clueless about cards as I was then.   Here are the ones from 2002:   These are all very nice and most are brand-spanking new to me -- if I ever want to collect a set where every card is new-and-fascinating, well 2002 Topps is a good place to start. This period beginning in 2001, I believe, is the start of the third manager card invasion, which lasted until Topps booted managers to Heritage about 10 years ago and now they've whitewashed the job off of cards altogether, except for sporadic appearances in A&G and such.   But speaking of "manager card invasions," this made me remember the post I wrote about the "second manager card invasion," which was the 1980s (and into the early part of the '90s)....

Managers no longer get baseball cards and I've devoted more than one post to what a tragedy that is.  Thanks to legal hoo-ha and a general not caring about anything except stars and rookies by the general card collecting public, managers haven't shown up regularly on cards for nearly a dozen years. And now the poor people who have been collecting since 2020 are wondering what to do with their Wander Franco cards. Manager cards would never steer you wrong. Well, most of the time.   We knew this collecting in the 1980s. It was the era of the Second Manager Card Invasion. It correlated with the Second British Invasion. In fact both invasions first started in the 1960s and then returned in the '80s. You didn't know rock n roll and manager cards had something in common, huh? Well, that's what this blog is for.   Objectively, the manager cards of the 1960s were better, just like the British Invasion music of the '60s was better. But I didn't collect in...

  I became aware of this card probably several months ago, filed it away as a future conquest, promptly forgot about it, then came across it again a couple of weeks ago.   It's now in my possession and it couldn't be more fantastic. I grew up with Luis Tiant as a key member of the Red Sox and then wrapping up his career with the Yankees and Angels (I was not old enough for the Indians and Twins version of Tiant). He is firmly entrenched with the AL East in my mind, one of my childhood favorites, and that's why it's so bizarre and so wonderful to see him in a Dodgers uniform.   Sure, El Tiante is part of a low-level team in the Dodgers' chain, but it doesn't make the card any less intriguing.   It's part of a litany of cards of players and other baseball figures in unfamiliar uniforms.   We've all seen the short-term stops cards for players, there's been plenty of blog posts about those. But what about coaches and managers? There's some weirdness ...

  The thing I liked most about Tommy Lasorda is that he told me I wasn't crazy.   Here I was, this young baseball fan, barely a couple of years into following the game, not terribly confident about my knowledge of it, heck, not terribly confident about much in life at all. That's what it's like when you're 11, and small, and soft-spoken ... and everyone else is so LOUD.   I was rooting for a team whose home base was almost 3,000 miles away. "What are you doing rooting for THAT team?" If it wasn't spoken -- and I'm sure it was -- it was thought, by the legions of young Yankees fans surrounding me.   The Yankees were all anyone talked about when it came to baseball where I lived. They were about the only team I could watch on a regular basis on the TV and they were the subject of the biggest headlines in the newspaper every day. Kids wore Yankees baseball caps and the only yearbook sold in the drug store nearby was the Yankees yearbook. Why would anyone ...