Night Owl Cards

  My place of residence hit a new low for degrees below zero early Saturday morning. Don't get excited, that's for the season, I've experienced 40 below previously, though thankfully that was back in the '90s.   But 22 below does cause you to ponder a few things. That is, until two days later when you get hit with a foot-and-half of snow and the brain switches into physical labor mode.   One of those things I pondered was a sometimes series I've done on this blog, and by "sometimes" I mean twice. I did it once in 2014 and once in 2021 . I would've done a few more of them but I tend to forget. Probably all that snow.   The series is based on what I used to do with my cards as a youngster: I'd go through an entire set and determine which players had the worst career batting averages. I'd place the 10 worst on the floor and then slide the cards over as a new contender entered the bottom 10.   So in 2014 I determined the bottom 10 for 1979 Topps. ...

  Last night at work I came across a Philadelphia Inquirer story suggesting that it was time to update the stats that are on the backs of Topps baseball cards. It was the familiar line you've heard before: the statistical categories we grew up with are antiquated, don't properly measure the value of a player, etc. And, although I've come to appreciate some newer stats like OPS, I'll never get a handle on all of them and, more importantly, I'll never care as much as I did with the other stats. There will always be a part of brain that values batting average and runs batted in because that's what I knew as key measuring stats for the first 25-to-30 years of my fandom. It's difficult to put that aside, and I'm not eager to see a bunch of new stats on the backs of my baseball cards (although the article headline doesn't seem to grasp that Topps has already incorporated a few of the newer stats on its backs). I don't think collectors these days look a...