Night Owl Cards

    I had another post planned for today, had the cards pulled and ready to scan, but death had other plans. You know the old superstition that notable deaths come in threes? Well how about finding out three well-known baseball figures of my younger days died within a 24-hour period? That's an unsettling ramp-up. It started yesterday afternoon and it's still going. Ken Holtzman. Gone. Whitey Herzog. Gone. Carl Erskine. Gone. All three have meaning in my young rooting life, Erskine the most obvious, though I never saw him play. I'll start with him because that's where I have the most to say.    Carl Erskine was on one of the first five 1956 Topps cards I ever owned. I've mentioned before that when we received a bunch of '56s from my dad's co-worker, my brothers and I split them up and decided that all the cards of each person's favorite team would go to that person (my one Orioles-loving brother got screwed). Erskine arrived with Newcombe, Randy Jackson, ...

As a fan who roots for the Dodgers, I find three recurring elements of the game more frustrating than any other. The first is leaving runners on base. I'm sure every fan of every other team feels this way about their team, too, but the Dodgers I am positive have led the league in runners stranded for at least the last 35 consecutive years. The second is seeing a pitcher that your team surrendered willingly turn around and beat your team. I witnessed this with Eric Stults just a couple of days ago. I could sit here for 15 years and not come up with a reason why the Dodgers couldn't hit Stults. The third is seeing a pitcher own your team year after year as if the only reason for his career is to beat the Dodgers. I've been aware of this one since I could root for a specific team. Over the years, I've come to know certain pitchers dominate the Dodgers. John Candelaria, Dennis Martinez, Mario Soto, Chris Carpenter. But I never had any numbers to back it up. Was i...

Today is National Left-Handers' Day . As a left-hander all of my life, I'm ashamed to admit that I didn't know there was a day reserved for me. And that they've been doing it since 1976. I thought of a way that I could make it up to myself, and of course those thoughts involve the blog and baseball cards. But before I get to that, a little perspective on life as a lefty. As you might have heard, it's not easy -- obnoxious right-handed desks in school, getting pen marks on your hand every time you write, operating a mouse on the right-handed side because we wouldn't dare subject a right-hander to using their left hand when operating the computer. In school the teacher would pull a container filled with scissors and distribute them to the kids during whatever scissor-cutting exercise was taking place. If I was very lucky -- and by "lucky" I mean maybe once every other year -- I'd find a pair of left-handed scissors. And then I remember one t...