Night Owl Cards

I no longer think of Don Mattingly as a Yankee in Dodgers clothing. I see him now, and he's pretty much all Dodger, as in "why's that fool Dodger manager taking out the pitcher now?" It was an easy transition. Mattingly always has been a likable sort, even dressed in pinstripes. There is really only one time that I can think of where I resented Mattingly's play on the ball field, and it wasn't for the usual reasons that I despise the Yankees. It happened in 1987. That was the year when Mattingly hit a home run in eight consecutive games, tying a major league record. The record he equaled was first achieved by Dale Long in 1956. Long, a respectable but mostly forgotten first baseman for the Pirates, hit a home run every game from May 19-28. That record was cool enough that I noticed it as a youngster and treasured it as a fun fact that most baseball fans wouldn't know because who the hell had ever heard of Dale Long? And then someone like Don Matti...

I have already said my goodbyes to this card. There weren't as many tears as I thought there would be. I had come to terms with the fact that it didn't fit in my collection a couple of months ago. In fact, I was the one who decided that it was probably time to trade it. I have owned this 1957 Topps Willie Mays card since I was 14 or 15 years old. It was one of the cards that arrived in that large grocery bag full of cards that my dad's co-worker gave to me and my brothers. Most of the cards were from the 1956 set, with a small number of '55s, '57s and '58s mixed in. As we took turns selecting cards from the bounty before us on the dining room table, I selected this 1957 Mays first. I picked it because it was Willie Mays ... duh. But also because I knew it had value. I was pretty sure from the moment that I saw the cards come out of that bag that it was the most valuable card in there -- monetarily speaking. This was the early 1980s. The card hobby was...

I received these 1992 gold parallel Dodgers from Johngy of Johngy's Beat the other day. Every time I get one these early '90s gold cards, it strikes me how elite they were back then ... and how cheesy they look now. Personally, I never liked them. Not even in 1992. But I certainly did appreciate how coveted they were at the time, and when I pulled one, it was about as close as I had come to being Charlie when he pulled the golden ticket. It's for that reason that I'm still trying to complete the gold parallel Dodger sets from this time period -- in homage to the folks who thought these were the most fantastic cards ever, and ... oh, hell, that's not really the reason. It's because I'm an irrational completist. Gold foil is the No. 2 thing that I wish Topps would scrap, behind whatever card stock it has been using for cards the last 20 years. I will never give these '92 and '93 foil-stamped cards a pass for what they spawned all these yea...

I like the 1995 set a lot. But I think the reason I have never committed to collecting it is it because it holds too many bad memories. Yeah, there was the strike the year before, but it's more than that. There was my fantasy league team. I have mentioned several times how lousy I was at fantasy league baseball. Every year at this time, I get solicited by folks online and off to join a fantasy league. And every year I ignore or decline. It's all because of how terrible I was participating in a fantasy league during the mid-1990s. I played in a league between 1993-95 (yes, we had the great misfortune of playing a fantasy league the 1994 strike). If I remember correctly, I was pretty good at drafting pitchers, but awful at drafting position players. Then my pitchers would go on the DL and my team would be stupid in everything. I'd lose interest about two months into the season and my fellow players would pick the remnants off my dead team's carcass for a hand...

Two recent, unrelated events conspired to remind me that I have not added anyone to the "I'm Badass and You're Not" Club for a long time. The first one was the realization that it is Dave Stewart's birthday. The famed "death-stare" pitcher for the A's and Blue Jays, who started out with the Dodgers, was as bad-ass as they come on the mound and already a worthy member of the Badass Club. The second one was receiving a pair of cards from AdamE of Thoughts and Sox . They are both going to my goal of completing the 2001 Upper Deck Decade '70s set, and each card features the same player: It's my catching hero from when I was a kid, Carlton Fisk. Fisk was legend in New England. New England-born and bred, he was the Olde Towne Team through and through, or at least that's how Red Sox fans looked at him. And even if you didn't grow up in New England, if you grew up in a family of Red Sox fans -- and Yankee haters -- then y...

You're scared. You think I'm going to start talking about math, aren't you? Come out from under that table. No, silly, I'm not talking about THAT kind of parallelogram. I'm talking about "parallel-o-grams!" Parallels that come in the mail! Cards like this: I'm sure folks have noticed how easy it is to accumulate parallels in 2013 Topps. I have managed to land these three Kershaws not even a month into the set's release, and I still don't have the Walmart or Target parallel of Kershaw's 2012 Topps card. I'm sure the reason for this is that there are more parallels per pack this year than previous years. I suppose this is "bad" for the market-watchers, people who sell cards or care about "scarcity" and all that yaaawwwwwwwnnnnn! But all I know is I have been scrambling around trying to get as many Dodger parallels as I can and it's been great fun! If Topps is going to up the count on its p...