Night Owl Cards

  Knowing full well that I was getting very close to completing the 1956 Topps set, I began to obsess about how I would present the news on this blog once it was finished.   I've completed a number of sets in my blogging day, including some of the great card accomplishments of my life, stuff like the '72 Topps set and the '75 Topps minis. But this was 1956 Topps, the first major set that I had completed that was produced before I was born.   Considering that I think it is the greatest baseball card set ever made-- many do -- and my long interest in the set going back decades, this was another blog post altogether.   But what? And how?   OK, I'll get to that later.   I'll first explain how I reached the end of the set.   When I last updated my progress , I had just landed the Mickey Mantle card and there were three cards to go. It was all but definite that I was going to complete the set, which was a feeling totally out of sync with what I thought for l...

My dad's favorite player is Ted Williams. It seems odd to write that sentence in the present tense. Williams stopped playing 57 years ago and, um, except for his head, is no longer with us. My dad is in his 80s and rarely talks about baseball in terms of being a fan. But I know he still has memories of Williams in action and remembers them fondly even if he never speaks of them. One of his favorite baseball books is David Halberstam's "The Teammates," which came out about 15 years ago and chronicles the relationship between Williams, Bobby Doerr, Dom DiMaggio and Johnny Pesky during Williams' final days. My dad reads a lot, but not many baseball books, so that's how much he still likes Williams. (I have the book, but I have yet to read it). Williams was known as "The Splendid Splinter," mostly, but also "The Kid," and "Teddy Ballgame". My dad, however, is fond of calling him by one of his lesser-mentioned nicknames, "T...

I've mentioned before that my folks have been known to collect. I'm sure that's why I've collected cards for most of my life. I simply inherited the gene. Although my dad had baseball cards when he was a kid (I believe his mom actually did throw them away), neither he nor my mom know anything about them now. But they know I like baseball and that I like to collect, so every once in awhile they'll throw something baseball-ish my way. "Maybe you'll like it, maybe you won't" they sort of say with a shrug of their shoulders. This I thought was fairly cool, and directly from my dad's stash. He was a Ted Williams fan growing up and he kept some Saturday Evening Posts from 1954 that he bought back then. The SEP published a three-part series of an interview with Williams, titled "This Is My Last Year". I'm sure this caused quite a stir. The articles appeared over three weeks in April, right at the beginning of the season. I hav...

I'm not an overtly patriotic person. That's a tough thing to admit, given where I live. Not only do I live in a very patriotic country, but I also live in a very patriotic portion of the country. I reside next to an army base where salutes to our military aren't reserved for this day alone, but pretty much every day of the year. I have no problem with this. I think I live in the best country in the world and our military deserves the credit for helping keep it that way. But I'm uncomfortable expressing more than that. I'm not sure why. I think part of it is I'm just not given to outward displays of emotion. The other part of it is I have little connection to the military. While I know several friends and acquaintances who have brothers, sisters, fathers who have served, I look around my family and see nothing but civilians. Although several relatives served our country in the past, they're all gone. The only connection left on this earth is my fathe...

(The Christmas crunch is here. A perfect storm of deadline shopping, visitors, sickness, winter weather and, of course, blogging. I hope to still be standing in a week. Here's to plowing through. It's Cardboard Appreciation time. This is the 94th in a series): I like this card even better than the original '52 Feller. The smile on this card exactly matches Chief Wahoo's grin. That is cool. I don't have very many Feller cards. I'm not an Indians fan and vintage is too expensive to be chasing every star who ever lived. But, like many of you, I do have a Feller story. When news of Feller's death arrived this week, I went upstairs, stepped into a spare room, and plucked a ball off a shelf. I've had the ball for a few years. It is autographed by Feller. I don't collect memorabilia that is not connected to cards. But I have this ball for a particular reason. It was given to me by my father. To the best of my father's recollection, his father...

My small Veterans Day story: My father is a veteran. He did not serve during wartime, but he did serve during a time of high anxiety in our country (the mid-1950s). My father's favorite team is the Red Sox and his favorite player is Ted Williams. Williams, of course, served as a U.S. Marine Corps pilot. My dad also knew something about planes, serving in the U.S. Air Force. My dad doesn't talk about his time in the service much. But a couple of years ago he did tell me and my wife one story that I couldn't believe had never come up before. My dad was scheduled to go on a flight to somewhere in the Pacific, but for some reason, at the last minute, didn't go (I don't recall the specific reason). The flight ended up crashing. And the people on the plane died. If having your own father narrowly cheat death doesn't make you ponder your own existence then nothing will. Here's to all of the veterans who put their lives in harm's way, whether they are part of a...

There's no doubt about it, Topps Chrome blue refractors are pretty cards. The word "pretty" has been used in recent years to describe certain super-fancy cards, and that has made me think: Cards? Pretty? Baseball? Pretty? Guys spitting and swearing and clutching and grabbing and yelling? Pretty? Cards and baseball just don't seem to go with "pretty." Neither does football or hockey or mixed martial arts for that matter. We never used to call cards "pretty." They were cool or sweet or awesome or even "gnarly" for a time. But not "pretty." And I think that's because back then so many of the cards we collected reminded us of our dads. The players looked like our dads. They looked like dad when he taught us to throw, all the while keeping one eye on the football game on the portable black-and-white on the patio. They looked like dad when he gave you that admonishing stare. "Now what did you really feed the dog, Jimmy?...