Night Owl Cards

(Greetings on March 15, otherwise known as the Ides of March, Oscar Day, Selection Sunday and World Baseball Classic semifinals day. It's also Everything You Think Is Wrong Day, set aside for folks to ponder that maybe they're not right all the time -- probably the most valuable thing to do out of this whole day. Time for Cardboard Appreciation. This is the 367th in a series):   Take a gander at this card. Not much to look at, huh? Maybe you'll find his story more interesting. Maybe not.   This is a card of Alonso Tellez (misspelled on the card). At the time this card was issued, Tellez was in the middle of his two seasons with the San Antonio Dodgers, the Double A affiliate of the Los Angeles Dodgers. Tellez played in 118 games for San Antonio in 1986 and 119 games in 1987. He batted .263 over those two years and recorded 48 doubles.   He also played in two games for the Triple A Albuquerque Dukes in 1986 and played in 104 games for the Double A Jacksonville Expos in 198...

So, where have I been all week?   Fair question. It is March, but I'm usually more consistent than this. A week ago Thursday I was getting a workout in during the early afternoon when I heard an unbelievable crash out in the driveway. From the kitchen windows, I could see ice falling and I knew it wasn't good immediately.   A giant sheet of ice slid off the roof and dropped two stories onto my vehicle. Windshield shattered, tail light gone, huge dents everywhere and $3,300-plus in damage. God love ya, March. I've lived in this house close to 30 years and nothing even close to that has happened.   For the past week, every single day, I've been chatting up either the insurance company, body shops, the tow-truck operator or whoever else deals in vehicle mayhem. Also, I've been working on a story for my newspaper. Every time I do one of those in-person, multi-person interview stories, it eliminates any other kind of writing (i.e. blog writing) from my schedule. That...

  Twelve years ago I wrote a post about the return of the Topps Future Star(s) label and my lack of appreciation for it when Topps first broke it out in the late 1980s (although it also used "Future Stars" to describe its three-player prospect cards at the start of the decade).   Since first returning in 2014 -- actually its second return as the Future Stars went on hiatus for 1992 and 1993 before coming back in 1994 -- the Future Star has continued strong for every Topps flagship set except for one. It's so much a standard part of the base set now that I don't think anyone even notices it anymore, at least certainly not like collectors did in the late 1980s.   There's a reason for that, I think, outside of showing up every year. I went through the last 12 years and broke down the Future Stars for each. The idea for this post began as a dissection of the Future Star(s) logo, but I found totaling Future Stars for each year more interesting.   Let's start with ...

  When you get to be my age time travels faster than ever. I think I've finally figured out that the reason older people talk about this so often is not to make idle chit-chat but because it's so staggering that you can't help but talk about it. It's shocking. I know almost a day doesn't pass without me thinking about how fast the days, months, years move.   I suppose this topic is especially appropriate today as we just moved the clocks ahead an hour last night. It's annually one of my least favorite days of the year and I'm writing this in a half-stupor thanks to that time change.   It's about the last thing I want to do at 60 years old -- speed things up. And here we are charging ever faster toward the start of the Major League Baseball season, which according to my research is starting earlier than at any point since I became a baseball fan.   This is discounting the recent super-early, one-off games or series in a foreign country that MLB likes to d...