Night Owl Cards

It's going to be a long week. Nothing out of the ordinary, just long. But if I stay patient and don't do anything stupid, there will be a paycheck waiting for me at the end. And then I'll be able to actually do monetary things with baseball cards! This is excellent news for you as well as me. These packages really need to get out of the house. Also, I need to buy a pack of Archives, so I can rip the set to shreds. Yup, that poor, unsuspecting set is going to absorb all of my pent-up "no new cards" negative energy. Of course, on the positive end, I'm looking forward to saving some of the cash for acquiring some cards that I actually enjoy. Cards like '75 minnnnniiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiisssssssssssssssssssssss!!!!!!!! By last count, I had accumulated a mind-blowing 453 cards from the set. A lot of the credit for that number goes to some people who have been able to find one of those secret fountains of '75 minis that spray ...

(Did you know that this month is "Little League Month"? ... Little League? In September? Aren't kids in school this month? Wasn't the Little League World Series LAST month? Is this like when the Atlanta Braves were in the National League West? Anyway, time for Cardboard Appreciation. This is the 160th in a series): I am convinced, and have been for a number of years, that even if I moved to a deserted island, far, far away from organized baseball, some how, some way, the Yankees would still be part of my life. I'm forever cursed with being forced to think about a team I hate. It will always be that way. I'm resigned to it. Take Sparky Lyle. Lyle was a Yankee for the most memorable part of his career and hated by me for that exact same period. But because I grew up in the Northeast where Yankee games were always available, even in the days before YES, I knew a great deal about Lyle and the rest of his Yankee teammates. They were in the papers. They w...

I cannot look at this Luis Tiant card -- or any Luis Tiant card -- and not think about his Yankee Franks commercial. It's a much loved, much awkward commercial of Tiant hawking propaganda hot dogs for his new team, the New York Yankees. Plenty of people remember it, yet finding it online is impossible. But just to give you an idea what it was like, here's another Tiant commercial pitch man atrocity: And you think commercials are bad on TV now? Anyway, the point is I'm looking at a Red Sox card and thinking about the Yankees. It was very strange back in 1979 to see Tiant, who was known and loved as a quirky, yet effective Red Sox pitcher, spinning and pivoting on the mound for the Yankees. In a house full of Red Sox fans and Yankee haters, we were disgusted with Looooie. But the scene would play out again and again with other players going from the Red Sox to the Yankees ... or the Yankees to the Red Sox. And each time, it would be a shock to the system. Se...

(Y'all know what an appreciation letter is, don't you? It's one of those letters you write after going on a job interview to express gratitude for the  honor of being interviewed. It's basically a "please, please, please, PLEASE hire me" letter. I recently came across an old appreciation letter from an employee who doesn't work for me anymore. If I'm being accurate, though, it was more bullshit than appreciation. In the end, I was the one doing the appreciating when this employee got a new job. Anyway, that's a long way to go to say: cards never BS you. Time for Cardboard Appreciation. This is the 54th in a series): Ladies and gentlemen, Topps 2010, Series I is complete. Georgie-Porgie here was the last card I needed to finish off the set. I actually landed two Posada cards on Monday. One was pulled from a pack. Then the mail arrived and Jorge showed up again, wagging his enormous ears at me. A big thanks to Mr. Dog Faced Gremlin for bein...

I can't believe someone like Josh Wilker or Ben Henry hasn't addressed this in a post yet. Perhaps they have, and I missed it. Anyway, this is something that has interested me for quite awhile in the way that things of absolutely no consequence interest me. This is the 1974 Topps card of Sparky Lyle. It was the last card I needed to complete the 1974 set. But that's not the topic of this post. The topic of the post is on the back of the card. Please note the cartoon. Click on the image if you can't see tiny type. Note what it says: "Sparky enjoys birthday cakes." Pretty innocuous wouldn't you say? Who doesn't enjoy a good birthday cake? But to me the cartoon is suspicious . What a very strange thing to put on a cartoon on the back of a player's baseball card. I mean, like I said, it's pretty much understood everyone enjoys birthday cake. I'd say 95 percent of everyone in North America likes birthday cake at least, say, oh, once...

One of the best parts of the uproariously funny blog Thorzul Will Rule is "My Secret Shame," in which Thorzul details his childhood fascination with his sticker book. Those posts are both heart-wrenchingly poignant and spit-out-your-Old Milwaukee's Best hysterical. I hope that sticker book goes on for 3,000 pages because I don't ever want it to end. So when a package arrived at my house Wednesday from Thorzul, after I received an unexpected email (it simply said, "I've got two of the last five 1978 Topps cards you need. Send me your address and I'll send them off to you this week."), I began pondering how I could appropriately start this write-up about the cards. I immediately thought of the "My Secret Shame" posts. Everyone has a "secret shame," after all. Maybe even two, three, four or four hundred of them. So, tonight, I present you with Night Owl's Secret Shame, as it relates to the Milwaukee Brewers anyway. I half ex...