Night Owl Cards

  Happy Canada Day to my Canadian readers.   I haven't written a Canada Day post in four years when once it was a semi-regular occurrence. This is no oversight, just someone writing a blog for two decades and running out of ideas.   For inspiration I went back to a post I wrote 10 years ago in which I researched a few MLBers who I didn't know were from Canada. I wondered if I could find some others. And I did.   This surprised me. I've lived near Canada for two-thirds of my life -- in three different places. I've attended baseball games in both Toronto and Montreal (and Welland, Ontario). And I've interviewed MLBers in one of them (Montreal). Maybe I should know more Canadians than Larry Walker, Joey Votto, Terry Puhl and Vlad Jr.   So here are a handful more of Canadian players I didn't know were Canadian. Although it's possible I did know at one time that they were. Facts are falling out of my brain all of the time these days.     JOHN AXFORD (Simco...

  I am in the final stretch in my 1985 Donruss completion quest. Just as I figured several months ago, I am getting this done during the summer when I have time to attack little projects like this.   Dwight Gooden has been placed in his proper page spot in the upper left, next to Barry Bonnell and above Dave Stieb. I am now down to two cards. The Kirby Puckett rookie card is on its way to me. That leaves the Roger Clemens rookie as the final card needed.   Set-collecting veterans know that one of the last stages of finishing off a set is determining what you missed -- what gremlins have slipped past the inventory clerks I have hired to make sure every card has been obtained and documented (check that, I am the only inventory clerk, and I am unpaid).   This time I found four gremlins and I have snagged them all before getting the final two cards -- it's embarrassing when you have the final card documented and then some gremlin ends up being last.   I shall now ex...

(Not a lot sports-wise can take me away from baseball during the summertime, but there is one exception. No, sorry World Cup fans, it's Wimbledon, and it starts tomorrow. Summer is here! Time for Cardboard Appreciation. This is the 371st in a series):   Those of you with favorite teams, do you ever play this game? Do you think about what era that you were not part of -- either because you weren't born yet or were not aware of baseball -- that you wish you could have experienced for your team?   I am fortunate that I have lived long enough to have experienced most of the 1970s Dodgers glory days and their 1980s standout seasons. Thank goodness I'm not in my late 30s and can recall only as far back as the '90s or '00s -- those were not fun Dodger times.   But I do wish I was around to witness two particular moments. The first is Sandy Koufax in his heyday, say, 1963-66. That would have been fun. The second is 1955 -- "next year" for Dodgers fans. I would hav...

  One of the many running sub-themes of this blog is how unobservant I am, and how concerned I am about it.   I scold myself over and over for not noticing things on cards, whether it was painted hats when I was a kid collecting in the 1970s or widely broadcast errors on current cards over the last 20 years. When I do notice a small detail I'm almost triumphant because finally my brain wasn't on auto-pilot.   I get concerned about this "flaw" because my real-life, salaried job is about noticing things. I'm supposed to be an expert on this. I am scouring whatever I can to get sports stories in the newspaper, whether it's locally or nationally. I've become pretty good at it -- well, actually I've been pretty good at it for a few decades now.    So my theory is that I spend so much time on "noticing" in my work life that maybe subconsciously my brain doesn't want to notice so much when it comes to my hobby. That's what I tell myself anyw...

  I went for a walk around 11 a.m. today. As I was returning home, the kids from the elementary school a couple blocks from me were getting out. It was a half day as is customary during the final week of school.   It's a great time of year but I don't need kids running down the block at noon to remind me how much I like this time of year. I have a job connected to the school year and that has been the case for more than 40 years.   If you had told me the night I graduated from high school that I would be celebrating the end of the school year more than 40 years later, I don't know what my reaction would be. Surprise, sure. I also might have looked for the nearest bridge.   For sure I am thrilled I've hit the easy season. No full slate of high school and college sports events, no late hours, no more coaches, no more parents, no more teachers' dirty looks.   To celebrate I have compiled an All-School team, just to rejoice over what we're all leaving behind for a c...

  This is not a post about Topps' decision a decade ago to drop managers from card sets. But what a fateful decision that was. I know I would be able to identify current managers -- heck even know their names better -- if they were still featured on baseball cards.   This is about a different time when managers went missing, and it was only a couple of them. And I sure did notice.   I started collecting in 1975. So I didn't know stand-alone manager cards, which were commonplace in the years prior. I knew managers as showing up as little head shot insets on the team card. That's where they appeared in the 1975 Topps set. Every team card came with a manager head shot in the lower corner.    This means that the manager in most cases showed up twice on the team card because he's also seated with his players and coaches in the team photo. But I didn't know that at the time. It was too tough for my little mind to figure out who was who in the mass of people. But I did...