Night Owl Cards

While looking for cards for another post, I was reminded again about my long-promised vow to conduct a "100 Greatest Cards of the '80s" countdown, similar to my "100 Greatest Cards of the '70s" countdown from 2017. I've been pledging to do that '80s countdown for two years now. A couple times I even set a date for when it would happen ... and then never carried it out. This is why I don't announce goals or make resolutions at New Years, especially when it comes to cards. I can't let deadlines and such into my hobby. Because I don't want to be that serious about collecting and I'll always break them anyway. You never know what's going to happen in your life, too. I fully intended to have an '80s countdown completed by now. But neither 2018 nor 2019 would let me do the work that I need to for a proper review. Dealing with my parents' illnesses and passings and also writing features for Beckett cut into my extra fr...

Yesterday, I was reminded again that Melvin Upton Jr. is a Blue Jay. It's difficult to keep track these days as players seem to be change scenery more and more often. And in this very "life goes too fast" year of 2016, I'm in a perpetual state of catch-up. It doesn't help that players like Melvin Upton Jr. are on a new team each year. It doesn't help that players like Melvin Upton Jr. didn't even have the same name he did less than two years ago! Yes, Melvin Upton Jr. started out on very different terms not so long ago. He played for a team formerly known as the Devil Rays. And Upton was formerly known as "B.J." That transition was marked by Topps in 2015, with a card in flagship and a card in Update: And a very helpful notation of the name change on the back of the Update card: That got me thinking about other name changes. I'm not referring to wholesale name changes, like David Arias transforming into David Ortiz,...