Night Owl Cards

  I'm not sure how coherent this post will be. I'm writing it while also trying to write a story for work on my day off, while on virtually no sleep, while being informed my car is dead for good, while it's 86 degrees inside . But I must show off the greatest miscut card I've ever seen in person before life finally finishes me off.   Here: This is a Dodgers card, no? This piece of cultural significance arrived from Corey, that well-known Tim Wallach collecto r . I don't know where he found it. It is such a perfect miscut card in every way -- notable '70s cult figure, Dodgers team name firmly intact, Mr. Gamble's photo entirely intact. You know this is going in my Dodgers binders, right? It's proof that Gamble played for the Dodgers. The back harbors goodness as well. You get all of Gamble's statistical history along with the beginnings of a second cartoon at the bottom. That's the comic for the Dodger who shares the card with Gamble. And I'd ...

On the day that Oscar Gamble died, I saw one of his cards for the first time. It's not as dramatic as it seems. I had not sorted through all of the early '80s cards that Adam sent me a couple of weeks ago. But upon hearing the news of Gamble's passing, I searched through them in a desperate effort to find a new attachment to the recently departed baseball card superstar. This loss hits me hard. I pulled Oscar Gamble's card out of one of the few packs of baseball cards I bought that first year I truly collected in 1975. It was in July. The AM station played Paul McCartney and Wings' "Listen to What the Man Said," The Captain and Tennille's "Love Will Keep Us Together" and 10CC's "I'm Not In Love". Burning lower on the charts was War's "Why Can't We Be Friends," and the already pervasive "Rhinestone Cowboy" by Glenn Campbell. My parents had taken my brothers and I to a lakeside communi...

A year ago, I was never madder at a card product than I was at Archives. A product that I had always viewed as a disjointed disappointment full of unfulfilled promise had committed the almost unforgivable act -- short-printing some of its own base cards so severely that it was nearly impossible to complete the set without spending more money than is reasonably expected to complete a modern set. It wasn't much of a deterrent for me because I never try to complete Archives (still, it was the principle of the thing). It's a jumble of 3 or 4 different past designs that makes for an odd completed puzzle. It's a disconnect for my senses and seeing it either compartmentalized by design every 40 cards or so, or a jumble of just those three/four designs would give me a headache if I were to see it in a binder. So I simply try to get the Dodgers each year. Yet, it's 2016 now and I'm still lacking two Dodgers from last year's base set. One is the Jackie Robinson car...