Night Owl Cards

I cannot look at this Luis Tiant card -- or any Luis Tiant card -- and not think about his Yankee Franks commercial. It's a much loved, much awkward commercial of Tiant hawking propaganda hot dogs for his new team, the New York Yankees. Plenty of people remember it, yet finding it online is impossible. But just to give you an idea what it was like, here's another Tiant commercial pitch man atrocity: And you think commercials are bad on TV now? Anyway, the point is I'm looking at a Red Sox card and thinking about the Yankees. It was very strange back in 1979 to see Tiant, who was known and loved as a quirky, yet effective Red Sox pitcher, spinning and pivoting on the mound for the Yankees. In a house full of Red Sox fans and Yankee haters, we were disgusted with Looooie. But the scene would play out again and again with other players going from the Red Sox to the Yankees ... or the Yankees to the Red Sox. And each time, it would be a shock to the system. Se...

Many times, we have all come across a player with a familiar name, realized they share it with someone famous, or maybe just some random person we know, and took off to tell someone. The blogs are full of posts about a guy who has the SAME NAME as someone else. When you think about it, the chances of that happening are pretty good, especially back in the day before people started spelling their kids' names "Brytenae." But still we are amused every time it happens. So, I decided to do some research. I tried to go through all of the names in major league history and come up with an all-time team of baseball players who shared names with famous people. I came across a lot of good ones. Jack Daniels. Matt Broderick. Fred Sanford. Ted Turner. Terry Bradshaw. Jackie Brown. Paul Mitchell. Gary Cooper. There were so many names that matched other famous people that I knew I would have to come up with some rules. The first rule was I had to have a baseball card of the pl...