Night Owl Cards

Today is Ron Cey's 68th birthday. I must acknowledge my favorite player of all-time's birthday each year and this year I'm doing it with a card I've shown before -- it's one of a dozen signed cards that I own of The Penguin. But it is special because it's Cey's signed 1976 SSPC card. It is special because I now own the 1976 SSPC set (which some call the 1975 SSPC set, but we all know you couldn't buy it until 1976). I recently completed a mammoth trade with Scott Crawford On Cards . More than 1,000 cards exchanged hands in the deal. And most of the cards I received were the 630 cards that make up the '76 SSPC set. I have long wanted this set for a number of reasons. It's a great-looking set that I have admired since I was a teenager, viewing it in the TCMA or Larry Fritsch mail-order catalogs. It features the players from my introduction to baseball, all of the greats from the mid-1970s. And, most important of all, it is a companion set ...

The Dodgers and Yankees are playing a doubleheader today and the first game pretty much went the way I expected. Plan on the same thing for tonight. It doesn't matter much to me because I was around for the previous time the Dodgers and Yankees played at Yankee Stadium (although it was the older stadium). In that game, the Dodgers demolished the Yankees 9-2 in the decisive Game 6 of the 1981 World Series and my satisfied smile was all my Yankee fan high school classmates saw the next day. The Dodgers and Yankees haven't played each other in the World Series since. That is why I will always like the MVPs from that Series, Pedro Guerrero, Steve Yeager and Ron Cey. It doesn't matter to me that Guerrero wound up a Cardinal, Yeager a Mariner and even Cey a Cub. No, the worst thing would be if they wound up a Yankee. Seeing Dodgers as Yankees or Yankees as Dodgers is very disorienting to me. They are two distinct franchises who are guided by different principles and back...