Night Owl Cards

  The birthday went pretty well. They're quiet these days. The highlight may be a new chair for my desk area where I type these posts. Yay! Also, I did use the gift card (actually two of them) for some current cards. You'll see that in the coming weeks.   After this post I'm taking a few days off from the blog. There are vacation things to do, yes, but also I've been getting a little cranky about blog stuff and that's an indication that I need some time away.   It'll also allow me to rededicate myself to some other topics besides showing off the latest cards, which I've done a lot of lately ... and am doing now.   A series of arrivals have been piling up on the roll-top desk and it's a mess so I'm clearing out. Enjoy the card view.     These were my latest claims on Diamond Jesters' Time Travel Trading. Both probably need explaining. For the Sweetness card, I added it simply because his earlier cards have been so difficult to obtain. Might as we...

  There are a lot of baseball card poses that were common on cards when I was collecting as a youngster that have mostly disappeared from cardboard.   One of them is the pitcher's "hands-over-head" wind-up pose. This pose used to appear on dozens of cards every year but it's been a long time since I've seen it in a current set. Maybe a one-off here and there.   Pitchers mostly have scrapped the long, drawn-out wind-up and did so beginning with the 1970s, or so I'm told. But I just reviewed a small sampling of game footage from the 1970s and here are the pitchers that were using that wind-up in the videos I watched:   Bruce Kison, Jerry Garvin, Steve Baker, Vida Blue, Jerry Koosman, Rudy May, Andy Hassler, Bob Knepper, Don Sutton, Dickie Noles, Jim Bibby, Eddie Solomon, Jim Rooker, Mike Cuellar, Don Robinson.   Here are the ones who weren't:   J.R. Richard, Jim Merritt, Steve Rogers.   So it was still prevalent in the 1970s.   Today it's still used...

  A co-worker friend of mine passed away earlier this week. I won't say he was a close friend, but he was a good guy and a diehard Dodger fan. Dodger fans are difficult to find in these parts, and we would talk about our team out in the work parking lot for far too long. The saddest part for me is he was able to enjoy his retirement for just three years, probably less than that because he spent two of those years battling cancer. I cannot get over that. It's not a happy time. I had a post cued up and ready to go that reflected my mood, a kind of "face the music" post that would likely bring the room right down. But I need to start becoming more aware of the days of the week. It's Friday. People want to read and hear and feel happy things on Fridays. I need to learn that. So what do I do to make myself happy? There are a few things: 1. Send out some card packages ✔ I forced myself out in the rain and did that earlier this afternoon. 2. Listen to th...

That's the first line of a note in the latest fantastic card package from Dave. "A little more of everything," is the best way to sum up the contents. I could easily break this up into six different posts, but what fun is that? No, you need to see this in its totality. Gaze upon the splendor. Marvel at the magnificence. Bathe in the bounty. We're going to cover a little more of everything. I'll start with this: That's a rack pack of 1987 Topps, carefully selected for the Fernando Valenzuela all-star glossy showing in the first panel. See, Dave takes me seriously when I say I want to try to complete 1987 Topps passively. I don't want to intentionally buy a 1987 Topps card. And I certainly don't want to put up a want list. I'd like to see how close I can come to doing this. I'm looking forward to opening this rack pack and seeing how many I need. Random Dodgers, most of which I'm sure fill holes (we'll see later). Yes...