Night Owl Cards

  It looks like I'll be going to a card show this weekend after all. It took a couple of extra hours at work Wednesday, Thursday and today to make it happen. I'm no longer convinced that it's a coincidence that work often ramps up around fun, recreational activities on my off-time. I now know it's a cosmic plot against me.   But I've gotten good at stamping out those conspiracies, although not without some damage. There's no way I'll be able to compose a list prior to the card show (sure, I could make a list instead of writing this blog post, but then what would you read?). Show lists are my motivation. They keep me focused and ready to hunt. It prevents me from wandering and being suckered into something shiny I don't really want. Instead I'm relying on a couple of card envelopes I just received for that motivation. If, at the show, I pick up nothing but the kinds of cards I landed in these mailings, I'll get exactly what I want. The cards come ...

I think it's pretty well-known that the Yankees have a facial hair policy. No beards. No girly hair. But mustaches are OK (and, so, apparently are Nick Swisher mohawks. That's right, no beards, but that monstrosity is fine.  I'll never decipher the Yankees). I think it's also well-known that the Reds had a facial hair policy for three decades, beginning in the late 1960s. It was some knee jerk reaction to hippies running wild and infiltrating our baseball teams. And it's probably known that when players leave the Yankees, or left the Reds back in the day, some of them grow facial hair because they had been deprived of this manly pursuit for so many years. I am going to focus on the Reds, because there's already way too much attention paid to the Yankees, and because I first noticed this phenomenon with the Big Red Machine teams of the mid-1970s. When players left the BRM, many of them suddenly appeared on their new teams sprouting mustaches and othe...

All right. I am absolutely certain that this card is a night card. There can be no dispute. We have the lights on. We have the dark sky. We have Jerald Clark bathed in illuminosity. We're batting 1.000. I bring this up for two reasons. First, two bloggers have sent me this particular card over the last few months. I do enjoy it when another blogger actually makes the effort to track down a night card, and there is no question that this is a beauty. The second reason I bring it up is because there seems to be some question as to whether the card below is a night card. Motherscratcher sent this card to me because he thought it was a night card. Two other people commented on the previous post that they thought it was a night card, too. I, on the other hand, am not so sure. I'm saying that it's not a night card, although there's not a lot of confidence behind that statement. The reason I say it's not is because the bank of lights is turned off. Also, the sky looks da...