Night Owl Cards

I used to try to get involved in every single group break that any blogger put out there, and then throw a private little stink fit when someone beat me to the Dodgers in one of them. I don't do that anymore. Mostly that's because there are a lot more group breaks than there used to be, and it's because I have figured out that I can't afford to get involved in more than one at a time. I'm OK with that. I don't freak out -- too much -- when someone lands a card that I want in a group break that I chose to skip. That's not to say I don't have my moments. Colbey at Cardboard Collections held one of his many group breaks a little while ago, and I didn't get involved because I was broke. The break ended up being a complete Dodger fest. This NEVER happens, not even in breaks in which I'm not involved. Yankeefest. Sure. Bravefest. Definitely. Astrofest. Yeah, even the Astros. But never Dodgers. After seeing the cards speigel landed from that...

In these posts, I will explore the moments when the hobby ever so slightly crosses the line from decorum and fellowship into ... "What Tha?" Don't expect a major rant or sudden feelings of outrage. In fact, all I'm trying to get out of you is a simple: "Dude, that's not cool." OK ... I was in the drug store yesterday. As usual, I did a slow scan of the long checkout area, because this particular store sometimes displays baseball cards. They had some. Rack packs of Heritage and last year's Chrome. Pretty good stuff for a drug store. Especially on this side of town. But dopey me had to pick up one of those rack packs of "100 Baseball Cards, including 10 Hall  of Famers!" because they're cheap, and because I've done pretty well pulling relics out of the things. But apparently they save the bastard repack rack packs for the corner drug stores. While the fancy rack packs are hanging 6 feet in the air, living the high life an...

Before I hit you with the second Cardboard Appreciation tournament and the weekly polls that come with it, I thought I'd squeeze in one more poll before that. Here's the deal: I was watching that commercial that's playing during baseball games this season. I can't even tell you what they're trying to sell. Credit cards or drugs or something. It's that one where they show little kids playing baseball, imitating famous home run moments of the past. The usual stuff: Carlton Fisk in '75 and Kirk Gibson in '88. That made me think about something that I've thought about before. The Fisk home run in Game 6 of the 1975 World Series is pretty much the epic home run of that decade. (Sure, there was Reggie Jackson in '77, but he hit three of them in Game 6. The drama is in the quantity more than the timeliness). The Gibson home run in Game 1 of the '88 World Series is the epic home run of the '80s (Cardinals fans will argue Ozzie and Royals ...

(The vacation season is here! Two more days of crap and then work becomes this thing that you merely visit in between doing whatever the hell you want! Here's to all of that. And baseball cards. This is Cardboard Appreciation. The 119th in a series): The only thing that I can visualize specifically about my girlfriend in 1985 are her boots. They were those elven boots that were popular with young women at the time. Flat, black boots that fell well short of mid-calf. She wore them all the time. I also remember that she wore a lot of grayscale clothes. Blacks and whites and, of course, grays. It wasn't because she was dour or anything. In fact she was very positive and upbeat. The best way I can describe her is she was like Punky Brewster, if Punky was 17 years old (I guess that would make her a budding Soleil Moon Frye ). She was a whimsical, spur-of-the-moment type. We worked in the same department store, and I remember one time when we were chatting and a woman came...

Did you read about that study from a few weeks back? Something about Facebook users getting a skewed view of how much fun people are having "elsewhere" and becoming depressed about their own mundane, boring lives? It's true that sometimes interaction through the intertubes can give you an altered perception of reality. Take my favorite topic lately, the Diamond Giveaway site. If you did all of your trading through that site, you would think that trading is a cynical exercise, one whose only goal is getting a lot of something for a lot of nothing. I'd say about 97 percent of the trade offers I get on the site are like that. Either that or a lot of people have an awfully inflated idea of what an '87 Mike Schmidt is worth. Meanwhile, I rarely can get any card that I want on the site unless I offer something of obvious greater value for it. That is how I received the Andre Ethier Diamond Diecut card yesterday. I gave up the Tommy Hanson diecut and a couple othe...

There is one unmistakable truth about this major league baseball season: The Dodgers are a bad team. I'm OK with that. I expected it going into the season, although maybe not on this level. But it's OK. My focus is on seeing a brand new owner in the executive offices as soon as they can get McCourt to slither out of his gold-encrusted hole. What I'm not OK with is an unmistakable truth that has gone on for the last 15 years. The Dodgers cannot beat the Angels. Interleague play is bad enough without the Dodgers getting a six-game lesson in failure every year. How am I supposed to work up any enthusiasm for Selig's pointless gift to the fans when my team goes in the tank every June because they have a mental block over the Angels? The Dodgers just completed another futile series in Anaheim, scrambling to come back in the 9th inning to salvage one game of the three. They'll face the Angels again this weekend and we'll see what sub-.500 record they ar...

Hey! How about that! I was told to "give it a rest" in the last post! Yay me! That's got to be worth some blogging points doesn't it? Do I get a certificate? I mean, how do you know if this blog thing is even on unless you're pissing someone off! Heh. Serves me right for going into a subject that I said I wasn't going to address again. But then I got into an ornery mood for a variety of unrelated reasons, and it just all came out. You've got to love projection. Or displacement. Or whatever the term is. I could continue to project, and say this is my own damn blog and I write it for my own damn amusement and if you don't like it then read something else, and that I wasn't talking to you anyway . But that would be rude and counterproductive. So instead, I'll just write about the Topps Giveaway site some more. You know one other thing that I like so gosh darn much about that ... Just kidding. Instead of going into something divisive ...