Night Owl Cards

As you can imagine, it took me almost no time to dispatch those Giants autographs that I opened on Christmas morning. The average time for me sending out cards in response to cards I've received is verging on between one and two months these days (March is a particular brutal month for this). But I was shipping out those Giants uggos within a week. I found the perfect victim ... er, recipient in Adam . I sent him almost all of the signed cards I received, with the noted exception of the Bobby Thomson. Despite his history against my team, I can't part with it, although I could be convinced. Adam then passed on some of the signatures to mr. haverkamp, and now you know the only two Giants card collectors that I know in the world. Then, both of them, sent me some Dodgers autographed cards in return! Boy, I think this blogging thing is going to turn out all right. I received seven autographed cards of seven different Dodgers. These days, I'm looking for autographe

(Welcome to the frozen tundra. Today's temperature has reached 18 degrees. That's the highest it's been in a week. The average morning temperature has been 23 below. This comes after three feet of snow in 24 hours two weeks ago and an ice storm that almost canceled Christmas. Also, snow could call off my card shop trip this weekend. Baseball ain't never coming back. Time for Cardboard Appreciation. This is the 197th in a series): I was looking through baseballcardpedia.com the other night, working on a blog project for some point in the future. I was scrolling through the 1981 Topps checklist and noting some of the mistakes made typing in the checklist. Baseballcardpedia.com is very useful tool, but I've got to figure out how I can get on there to edit. I can fix some of those name typos in five minutes. When I got to Ken Landreaux's name in the checklist, there in parentheses next to his name was this notation: "Keith Olbermann's right leg ca

Baseball revels in numbers. It's been that way for longer than I've been following the sport. But it's never been more the case than in the last 10-20 years. With the advent of new statistics to evaluate players, it's obvious that fans and people in the game are relying more and more on numbers to understand the sport. I like numbers. But too much math makes my brain hurt. So I keep it simple. I stick to biggest and best, smallest and worst. And dates and anniversaries. Love the dates and anniversaries. Twitter is great for this type of stuff, and there are baseball fans everywhere tweeting factoids about the sport.  Given that, I'm a bit surprised that no one has picked up on the card backs in 1979 Topps. Any collector of that set knows that the identifying element on the card backs that year was an "on this date" feature. Each player card displayed a random date and a baseball fact that happened on that date. Most of the happenings were pretty o

I'm amazed at how quickly some people work in this world. I recently completed a trade with Paul of the blog Paul's Random Stuff. He sent me my cards in record time. Meanwhile, I poked around, slowly assorted a Mets stack and eventually shuffled off to the post office. I think Paul finally received his cards yesterday. So what happens? He even POSTS the cards he received from me before I post mine, even though the ones he sent me have been sitting on a shelf, waiting patiently, so very, very patiently, LO' THESE MANY YEARS. (Sigh) I so admire effiency. Anyway, I'm quite enjoying Paul's blog, and even though he talks about 1988 like it's a BAD thing (hey, buddy, that was one of the greatest years of my life you're talking about there), I can let it slide because he's always posting good stuff. You can read about what I sent him here . Meanwhile, it's about time I featured the Dodgers that I received. Note that almost all of them are from that t