Night Owl Cards

I'm probably not going to do an end-of-the-year "Best of 2012" countdown this year like I normally do. I still have time to change my mind, but right now, when I think of "2012" and "cards," the word "best" is not anywhere near the first word on my lips. So I might want to steer clear of that. But I know how everyone loves countdown shows -- myself included -- so this is what I can offer: the 10 best Dodger cards in my collection, also known as "The Best Dodger Cards Ever Made." Yep, it's time for greatness. So no more ados. It's time for eye-feasting. 10. Sealing Yanks' Doom, Game 4 1963 World Series, 1964 Topps Granted, the photo is nothing great, except for the fact that Frank Howard is teeing off on Whitey Ford for a home run. But the caption is the greatest headline ever written. A caption announcing the death of the New York Yankees. A death knell for the Yankees on cardboard. It's glorious, a...

For the first time, I can see which cards are up for contention as THE best Dodger card ever made. The list is down to 20 cards and after selecting cards 20 through 11, I now know what is left. You may have thought that I had already picked out the best card. Nope. Time is too valuable to carve out an hour or two to rank all 100 cards at once. Instead, I ranked them section by section, ignoring the best of the best until their turn came up. But now that I see what's left, I've got some big deciding to do. Yet, on the plus side, all of these cards are so good that I have featured them all on the blog at one time or another and therefore ... NO SCANNING. Yay! Time-savers are my favorite thing in life. So, focus your attention on these 10, tremendous, already scanned Dodger cards: 20. Frank Robinson, 1972 Topps, traded subset I'll start with a couple of all-time greats who spent just a brief period of time with the Dodgers in the early 1970s. Frank Robins...

I received a card in the mail a couple of days ago that is so good that it automatically appears in this countdown. In fact, it's so good that it automatically belongs in the Top 30 cards yet to be counted down. Will we see that card here in this post? That will be revealed by the end of the post. Time for cards 30 through 21. By the way, the ranking is getting quite difficult at this point. So let's go before I change my mind again: 30. Don Drysdale, 1961 Topps For my money, the single greatest Drysdale card ever made. Oh, sure, the card could be better -- if Topps had the forethought and the ability and the guts at the time to take a photo of Drysdale glowering on the mound as a batter lay sprawled at home plate half scared out of his wits after being knocked flat. THAT would be better. But we don't have that. What we do have is Drysdale giving someone a "oh, yeah ? Well, you're next " look. And that sums up Big D on the ballfield pretty...

In my line of work, "context" is important. I'm not merely referring to sports figures who try to pass blame by claiming "I was taken out of context." I'm referring to "news value." Whether something is "news" or not has a lot to do with "context." When, what, where, why, who, etc., etc. You know the drill. But a lot of people do not. I don't know how many times I've had to explain to someone why we did a certain story or why we didn't do a certain story. It all has to do with "context," and often the response I get back is a blank look or silence on the other end of the line. This countdown has a lot to do with context as far as the cards I've picked. It's not merely the way the card looks. Although that does have a lot to do with it, if I was doing this countdown based solely on "look," there would be much different cards. It'd either be a countdown of all MOJO MAD HITZZZZZZZ ...

I am one of the very few people left who still listens to his local radio station. It's about seventh on my list of "ways to hear music" (when once it was absolutely No. 1), but it's still an option. One way that this particular radio station -- which usually airs absolute atrocities that they call "music everyone can agree on" -- has won me back as a regular weekend listener is that it has started airing old American Top 40 countdown shows from the 1970s and 1980s on Saturdays and Sundays. I imagine other radio stations do this, too, since everything in radio is syndicated. But it is such an amazing blast from the past. My teenage years were filled with Casey Kaseem counting down the hits during the early 1980s, and when the radio station decides to air the countdown show from, oh, say, Nov. 18, 1982, my mind is officially blown. The '70s shows are even more of kick because that was before I started following music and hearing what was on the t...