Night Owl Cards

  I didn't post yesterday, mostly because I was gathering my thoughts (and pictures and scans) on what I was going to say about the latest step in Sports Illustrated's demise. The news yesterday was so stunning that I almost couldn't believe it and didn't want to write anything about it for fear it was all internet hysteria and we could go back to pretending that print journalism was still on a ventilator and not one final shovel of dirt away from burial. But it doesn't appear to be good news in any event. The patient is dying. The end is near.   This past week was terrible for traditional sports journalism. The Sporting News laid off folks, including Ryan Fagan, who I've mentioned a few times on this blog and was basically the face of TSN for me. Then the news about SI laying off virtually everyone appeared. I knew the faces of a couple of the writers who are losing their jobs there, too, thanks to social media. This is crushing. And this type of stuff is a re...

This trophy grabbed my attention right away and although it might be difficult to find space in the home for something that size, I prefer that to the MVP trophies the All-Star Game is giving out these days. If you are like me, you were unaware that the look of the MVP trophy has changed over time. It didn't even dawn on me until I saw this card and I automatically recognized that All-Star MVPs of recent years weren't hauling around things like this immediately after the game. No, the All-Star MVP trophy now looks like this: It's a glass baseball bat. Sturdy, appropriate and easy to store, but not what I think of when I think of a trophy. The baseball bat MVP trophy has been around at least since 2009. Here Carl Crawford displays his All-Star award. It's a bit odd that he's showing a bat when he received the award for a leaping catch that kept the Rockies' Brad Hawpe from a home run and saved the game for the American League. But the bat award...

I'm going to a card show this weekend. I think if you ask most collectors, a card show is the epitome of card shopping experiences. I know I certainly believe that. Still, there are others who claim that shopping online is the most productive card shopping experience. And I can't really argue with that after what recently arrived in the mail. I came into a little money last month -- work bonus time -- and I devoted some of it to a COMC shopping spree. I buy cards on COMC maybe twice a year. That's about all the budget will allow. But each time it's a blast and there is so much to choose from that I have a difficult time picking a direction. As always, I adopted the scattershot method, focusing exclusively on Dodgers this time, but all across the board in terms of card style. There were 1976 SSPC cards like Steve Yeager up top and super shiny black refractors ... ... like "Game Over" Gagne here. I just find too many different kinds of cards ir...