Night Owl Cards

  Last night at work I came across a Philadelphia Inquirer story suggesting that it was time to update the stats that are on the backs of Topps baseball cards. It was the familiar line you've heard before: the statistical categories we grew up with are antiquated, don't properly measure the value of a player, etc. And, although I've come to appreciate some newer stats like OPS, I'll never get a handle on all of them and, more importantly, I'll never care as much as I did with the other stats. There will always be a part of brain that values batting average and runs batted in because that's what I knew as key measuring stats for the first 25-to-30 years of my fandom. It's difficult to put that aside, and I'm not eager to see a bunch of new stats on the backs of my baseball cards (although the article headline doesn't seem to grasp that Topps has already incorporated a few of the newer stats on its backs). I don't think collectors these days look a...