Night Owl Cards

   Someone on social media posed the question the other day regarding Rickey Henderson's domination of the American League stolen base title during the 1980s.   Henderson led the AL in stolen bases every year from 1980 through 1991 except for one.   The question: who led the league in stolen bases the year Henderson did not?   I had no idea.   I was on top of that stuff during the latter half of the 1970s and early 1980s. That's because baseball cards were there for me, specifically league-leader cards. I've mentioned many times how I relied on baseball cards to tell me important facts from the previous year -- league leaders, postseason results, records broken, etc. I went to cards before the newspaper or TV.   That's how those facts entered my head and stayed there. If someone asked me who led the American League and National League in batting average in 1977, all I needed to do was picture the '78 League Leader card with Dave Parker and Rod Carew on...

  The other day I was talking to a co-worker who is approximately my age and we were discussing the commercials we'd see on sports broadcasts when we were kids. Naturally, we talked about the "Less Filling/Tastes Great" Miller Lite beer commercials because those goofy ads appealed to young viewers, unlike the boooring Miller Beer or Lowenbrau commercials that usually showed "old" guys in a fishing boat or adults toasting at a family gathering. I couldn't wait until those ads were off the TV. Talk moved to the commercials that I remember showing up during the seventh inning stretch on NBC's airing of the Game of the Week on Saturdays. I recall the Rolaids Relief Man Award commercials airing at that time, along with Johnny Bench hawking Krylon spray paint ("no runs, no drips, no errors'). I tried to find a Rolaids Relief Man video from that time, but apparently '70s videos simply are not all that available. Most of what I found were the Old Sp...