Night Owl Cards

This is the post that I teased to last week when I wrote those back-to-back posts on Fan Favorites. Out of the three Topps All-Time Fan Favorites sets issued between 2003-05, which set was the best? For me, "best" means that the cards themselves properly reflected the player, the team and the design. That's because it's very apparent that Fan Favorites' attempt was to show each player with a team for which they were popular, a "favorite". It also tried to pick a year, meaning the Topps design it chose, in which the player did particularly well or was noted in some other way (it was their rookie year, for example). It's the reason why I love the set so much ... that, and all of the new photos that were used. I don't know how you determine accurately which set is the best by looking at every single card in each set. That sounds exhausting. So, what I did instead, is figured out which individuals received a card in 2003, 2004 and 2005. And th...

This is a continuation of yesterday's post concerning Topps' All-Time Fan Favorites sets from 2003-05. Check it out if you want to get up to speed. While tackling the opposite end of the All-Time Fan Favorites spectrum -- the least favorite of the favorites -- I realized something: If being well-liked is important to you, do not become a baseball broadcaster. Looking for "least-liked" in a set of supposed favorites isn't the easiest thing to do, but the cards that jumped out at me as people who have been criticized a time or two were almost always announcers. People are willing to dismiss your travails or faults if you play on a baseball field, but you better damn well be Vin Scully or Ernie Harwell if you are broadcasting. That was interesting to me. So, anyway, these are the 10 least favored fan favorites from the set, the "what the heck is this guy doing in here" people in the set. The "honorable mention" picks that just missed...

My obsession with Topps' All-Time Fan Favorites sets, circa 2003-05, continues. I have completed two of the three sets and finally, yesterday, I put up a want list for the 2003 set. Turns out I need just 11 cards to complete it. That shouldn't be too difficult. While I was researching which cards I needed, a thought came to me: which of these players are the biggest fan favorites of all? There were obviously players with more devoted fans than others. For example, Nolan Ryan was/is a bigger favorite than Darrell Evans and both players appeared in Fan Favorites. So I decided to put together a top 10 list of my perception of the most favored fan favorites. This is based on what I see here on the blogs and other online sites, in my interactions with baseball, and my experience over the years. It's by no means the most accurate, this is merely my perception. I eliminated any Dodgers from consideration. As a Dodgers fan, it's difficult to get outside of my own fando...