Night Owl Cards

(It's the end of February, meaning I'm as exhausted as all get-out, the perfect state of mind heading into the busiest month of the year. Yay! Time for Cardboard appreciation. This is the 268th in a series): Take a look at this card and what do you see? At face value, it is a "play-at-the-plate" card. In simpler times, I'd try to determine when this play happened and the outcome of the play. But let's go deeper. What else do you see on this card? Yes, it's a card of two future major league managers. Two future, current major league managers. A.J. Hinch of the Astros and Mike Matheny of the Cardinals. I'm sure two future managers have appeared on the same card before. But I don't know how many of them were involved in a play at the plate. To make this card more personal, though, it happens to be a card of two future managers who are younger than me. Ah, now you've reached the point. I don't like A.J. Hinch very much. It...

The start of the busiest period of the entire work year began this week. This weekend is packed with sports chaos, and I expect every week and weekend to be like that until late March. You don't notice the bedlam here because I try to keep it away from the blog as much as possible. Good ol' night owl just keeps posting as much as he can. But it wreaks havoc in other hobby ways. The organization of my collection is always a disaster at this time of year. I have trouble sending cards out to people. If I can even get cards packaged, the packages often sit there lonely for sometimes weeks. And, every once in awhile, I throw out a rambling post like this with no cohesive thought. The cards are deserving of more, but sometimes a dude's got to eat and pay bills and figure out why the car suddenly sounds like a chipmunk stuck in the engine, you know? So let's just accept the disarray. Above is a signed card of the recently deceased Doug Harvey. I received it from M...

There is a clipping pinned to a bulletin board at work just as you walk into the sports department. It is a copy of a high school sports game write-up from another newspaper. It's your typical roundup item, two paragraphs long. But those two paragraphs are so error-filled -- nine lines of text and about eight things wrong with them -- that the correction that the paper ran the next day is twice the size of the original roundup item. This amused me so much that I had to pin both items side-by-side onto the bulletin board. In the newspaper world, this is one of our greatest fears, that you will attempt to correct an error and just make things worse. So in typical black-humor fashion, I posted one of our greatest fears for all to see. I have never witnessed so many errors committed in one tiny space. Until I came across this Larry Milbourne card that I recently posted on my 1985 Topps blog. The back of that card is a treasure trove of mistakes. First, let's addre...

The underlying reason behind my recent quest to pursue 1980s Fleer sets (and some of the early '80s Donruss sets) is a continued mission to connect with the baseball players who were in the game when I was a kid. I'm not in this hobby for the dudes that play today. As much as the current hobby thrives on Judge and Trout and the hot rookie du jour, that does very little for me. I'm not even in this hobby because of Kershaw or any of the current Dodgers. The guys who played and managed in the game in the '70s and '80s keep me collecting cards. They keep me connected. They keep me young. Sure, all of them have stopped playing. They're all old now. Some of them have died. But they will always have more meaning to me than anybody who played in the 1990s, 2000s or today. So, with most of the Topps sets completed from my childhood, I'm searching for other avenues. Fleer is at the top of the list. So is Hostess and Kellogg's 3-Ds. Beyond that, I'm a...

I have been collecting cards for a long time, but I don't think I know all that much about them. For example, when I first started blogging, the card blogs were dominated -- at least in terms of frequency and zeal -- by collectors who grew up with cards from 1990s. The most prolific of those blogs was Wax Heaven, and I learned quite a bit about what went down in the '90s from Mario. It's a very confusing period for someone who didn't collect at that time, and I imagine it is confusing even for those who did. But I started to get a handle on the difference between Pacific and Pinnacle, the rise of the relic and autograph cards, and something called "dufex" thanks to reading that blog. Then Wax Heaven went silent. And so did many of the blogs from other '90s collectors. I still had much to learn, but there weren't many bloggers willing to dive into the depths of '90s cards. One -- the Junior Junkie -- does an excellent job, but he's pull...

  (Programming note: The 2 million views contest entry window is about to close. I've tacked on a couple extra hours for west coast readers, but the deadline is tonight, 2 a.m. EST/11 p.m. PST. If you want to enter, go here for the rules ). It's Presidents Day, a day I seem to work just about every year. I suppose that's appropriate since I've never been the political type. But before shoving off to the job, I engaged in one of those exercises that are supposed to help geezers of advancing age keep their minds sharp. I tried to put together an all-presidential name team. But it's not just any generic presidential name team. It's filled with Dodgers. Here it is: First Base: Gary CARTER He may be listed as a catcher on this card and played the position for about 95 percent of his games, but he obviously isn't catching here. He's playing first base. He did that with the Dodgers from time-to-time. Second Base: Chris TAYLOR Som...