Night Owl Cards

As you might know, the Baseball Writers Association of America will be releasing their selections for the Baseball Hall of Fame this week. The news has kind of been on the internet a few times. In the past I've gotten a little irritated at the critics of the Hall and the BBWAA and gone on a few rants. While I agree that there are chiefly flaws in the voting rules that prevent deserving players from entering, I am now far more irritated by the nonstop bitching from both sides about the who, what, when, why and how of everything Hallish. It's too much talk, it's too much emotion, it's too much angst and it's gone on too long. So, this year, there won't be a rant. Because it's just a Hall of Fame. That's all it is. A building with some fancy plaques. Some people say certain players get in it and that's all. But whether the players get in or they don't, they're still talented players. They wouldn't be considered if they didn't ha...

First, if you have an aversion to reading to the end of posts, or clicking on links, or reading labels, then you probably missed my mention in the last post that I have officially created a '71 Topps blog. Again, it's not starting until sometime next month, and I've still got work to do on it, but you can check it out if you're into it. OK, now for a little newspaper story. Our newspaper is owned by a family that goes way, way back. A few years ago, that family acquired some smaller newspapers that are also in our coverage area. Once fierce rivals, we are all now fellow employees. You can imagine how awkward that is. And there isn't a week that goes by in which that awkwardness doesn't pop up and sing, "HELLO!" But mostly it's more confusing than awkward. Trying to coordinate several people from several different newspapers that are hours away is not easy. One of the many, many small things that must be considered is which newspaper gets ...

OK, with this card, I have now officially displayed 100 night cards in the Awesome Night Card format on this blog. That is quite the occasion for a night card addict like me. To mark the occasion, I have purchased a binder to house my night cards. Yes, I know what you're thinking: "you mean, you don't have your night cards in their own binder already?" No, I don't. Although I collect them, I've never separated them. They are merely included in my 1991 Topps binder, or my 1984 Topps binder, or my many Dodger binders, or wherever they land in my arbitrary filing system. There has never been an O-fish-ee-al Night Card Binder, until now. This is a big step, because not only have I recognized another subset of my card collecting hobby in binder-and-page form, but I now must start collecting duplicates of a lot of these cards. In fact, that has been the one thing that has kept me from getting a night card binder (that and the fact that I hate shopping for...

Not a lot of love for 1989 Bowman is there? First of all, it's pretty damn dull. Secondly, it's too big to store in standard pages. Thirdly, it's pretty damn dull. ... Oh, did I mention that already? Sorry. It's just that it's dull. Also, 1989 Bowman -- ressurrected by Topps after an absence of more than 40 years -- seems quaint compared to what we know of Bowman today. Bowman is now synonymous with rookie card madness and is basically crack for Strasburg searchers. So, that gives the '89 Bowman set a little bit of charm, at least for me. But only a little. The other thing that draws my attention to the set are the backs: Bowman went with backs that were constructed in a way that I had never seen in 15 years of collecting to that point. Instead of the standard year-by-year statistics, Bowman presented the statistics in terms of how a player performed against each team. At first glance, this was confusing. But once you knew what you were looking at, i...