Night Owl Cards

I recently overhauled my diet. A major, sweeping change. It was out of necessity. Doctor's orders. Considering that I am healthy in just about every measurement that the general public uses to judge tip-top shape, I'm still dealing with the emotional resentment that comes with this new direction. But I agree, it's for the best. This means, when I go out to a restaurant -- and this has happened already -- I do not order what other people order. I order something that appears "less fun," or "sad," even. But, really, I'm OK with it. I'll have to get used to other people's reactions to what I'm eating (that's OK, sir, just keep pounding down those cheeseburgers). But that won't be much of an issue either. That's because I'm used to being an oddball. I've always had oddball tastes. Not VASTLY oddball -- as today's alternative and extreme lifestyles have demonstrated -- but out of the mainstream just enough. I...

You can't be in this blog business for very long before collectors are sending you items "just because." I take it as the ultimate compliment, that people see something, think "night owl might like that," and take the time to package it up and send it my way. The vast majority of these packages contain baseball cards. But sometimes they don't. I received a couple of unusual packages recently. The first arrived from Ryan at The Great Orioles Autograph Project . Ryan has been a reader of this blog for awhile, and I always really appreciate his comments. He's one of those guys who will actually let you know that what you wrote may have struck a chord. Not everyone does that, so when someone does it's very cool. Anyway, he sent an oddly shaped box and I had no idea what was in it. What came out were definitely not cards. Now, these items weren't scannable, and I have no time to set up a photo studio and take pictures. So I had to find ...

Thanks to Ryan of The Great Orioles Autograph Project , I can now close the book on at least the baseball portion of the Brush With Greatness series. He sent me the last card I needed so that I would have a card of every major league player/manager that I had ever interviewed. Jeff Datz played in only seven games as a catcher for the seventh-place 1989 Detroit Tigers. That was his entire career -- 10 at-bats, 2 hits. You are forgiven for missing it. I certainly did. Datz didn't hold on to his playing career for very long. By 1994, he was a professional manager in the Cleveland Indians organization, leading the New York-Penn League Watertown club. Datz's team set a franchise record for victories in a season. A year later, the Watertown Indians would win their only NY-P title, but Datz wasn't part of the team then, and almost all of the players were different. That's how it works in Class A ball. I covered only one Indians game that '94 season as it wasn...

I am not the most positive person in the world. Even when the Dodgers make seemingly intelligent decisions like they did today -- scrapping Scrappy McScrapperson, Ryan Theriot, after only a couple of months to land a much needed middle reliever -- I expect it to come with a catch. Instead of being relentlessly upbeat, I am relentlessly examining the fine print. So even though I haven't been as happy to see a former Giant come over to the good side since Brett Butler changed his evil ways, I'm certain the bad news will come in the form of a pudgy strikeout machine that is now the Dodgers' starting second baseman. Sure, Uribe can come through in the clutch -- he's demonstrated that against the Dodgers -- but there is a whole lot of padding his un-base percentage in between. But that's me being negative again. I'm trying to cure that character flaw. It's hard to do so when being negative actually produces positive results. In fact, very recently, I won a...

I received two packages in the mail the other day. Both were similar in one special, super-fantastic way. But at the start, I regarded each with suspicion. I've never been a suspicious person. I always give people the benefit of the doubt, and I've been known to give someone a second or third chance. But all of that has changed ever since the evil genius from Wisconsin road into town. Now, I'm living in a world of  human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together, and mass hysteria . I need an exorcism on my mailbox. The first package arrived from Brian of 30-Year-Old Cardboard . I opened it with the precision of an explosives expert. What came out was an envelope with a handwritten message. I have really come to loathe hand-written messages. This is what it said: Well, if that isn't a prelude to a bipping, I don't know what is. I opened the envelope and was greeted by another envelope. It said this: Great. Creative packaging designed to produce an a...

Long before Phillies fans were howling the first name of their left fielder, Ibanez , (it sounds so much better than " Buuuurrrreeeeelllll !" doesn't it?), Dodger fans were doing the same for their right fielder, Mondesi . Raul Mondesi was my favorite player during the 1990s, a decade laced with Dodger misery. But Mondesi could do it all -- hit for average, hit for power, run and, best of all, obliterate baserunners heading plateward . I didn't even mind his belly flops into second base. He was very entertaining to watch. But Mondesi came along during a time when I wasn't collecting cards, so I have had a lot of catching up to do. Now, I have a healthy number of Mondesi cards. But as Ryan of The Great Orioles Autograph Project found out, there are always Mondesi cards that I need. Most of the Mondesi cards from Ryan came from 1995, which is an ideal year to find cards that I don't have. Combine a year when I didn't collect with a year in which co...