Night Owl Cards

  Fans today should have no trouble identifying the top prospects in their favorite baseball franchise's system. Dozens -- maybe hundreds -- of sites on the internet devote countless words to every prospect on the way up. And, if you still chart your prospects through cards, you'll have no trouble there either. Any prospect who is anybody has appeared in Bowman for years before they even make the majors and if that somehow isn't the case, Topps and Panini will be sure to shove that player into a regular set, even multiple times, to make sure you know.   Ever since the late 1980s, and definitely since Bowman began devoting itself to prospects, figuring out which rookie is who and how good has been maybe the easiest thing to do in all of collecting. Just follow the noise and babble.   When I first began collecting as a kid, it wasn't this easy.   Unless you lived in a town with a minor league team, figuring out the top rookie prospects was a bit of a challenge, if anyo...

I've written before about my high standards for baseball prospects as a kid collecting cards. During the '70s and early '80s, prospects appeared on three- or four-player cards because back then there was a hierarchy, dammit. No prospect was getting an individual card. I appreciated the rules at the time because I looked at the multi-player rookie cards as a proving ground. There was a pattern: appear on a multi-rookie card and then get your own card. This was why I became so dismissive of players who appeared on multi-player cards multiple years. I've cited the Dale Murphy example repeatedly. How could he amount to anything? He had failed the pattern! Hello! Appearing on a multi-player card once means you appear on your own card the next year! This was not realistic of me and obviously an inaccurate barometer of talent as Murphy went on to a long and productive career (just not as a catcher), even if his first solo Topps card wasn't until 1979. Besid...