Night Owl Cards

  The Hall of Fame announced its 2024 class this evening (once upon a time this was held much earlier in the day) and thanks to the constant vote tracking online, there wasn't much of a surprise about who was selected. The most I heard about this class in the lead-up is whether Billy Wagner will make it (He didn't).   Wagner didn't play for the Dodgers. Neither did official HOF selections Joe Mauer or Todd Helton. I'm looking for Dodgers to get in the HOF, pretty much all I care about when it comes to HOF votes.   Fortunately, there is one who got in easily this year, Adrian Beltre. He won't get a Dodger hat on his plaque, but he played for them first and for more years than all but one team and even then it's just one additional year. I'm not irked by this as much as when Mike Piazza went in as a Met in 2016 (even "irked" is too strong a word, heck, "mildly miffed" is too strong). The key thing is, just like with Piazza, the Dodgers are ...

  Set completion seems to have gotten more and more challenging over the years, so I like to celebrate every instance I can, big or small.   I finished off a long-neglected project this past weekend when I received an envelope from Max of Starting Nine . Inside was a card from the 2002 Upper Deck Vintage Night-Gamers insert set, which was the Pudge Rodriguez you see here. It's the last card I needed to finish it. It's a 12-card set, which does not fit at all in a nine-pocket page, unless you double-book like I often do and then it fits, but it's awkward. Here they all are neatly. It amazes me that the Jeter card wasn't the final one I needed. It was second-to-last. I didn't know this set existed before I discovered card blogs. In fact, I didn't know that Upper Deck Vintage existed or even that UD made cards at that time, outside of the 2001 UD Decade '70s set that I discovered at a Fay's Drugs in town, probably in 2002. This was the dark period for my co...

  I didn't post yesterday, mostly because I was gathering my thoughts (and pictures and scans) on what I was going to say about the latest step in Sports Illustrated's demise. The news yesterday was so stunning that I almost couldn't believe it and didn't want to write anything about it for fear it was all internet hysteria and we could go back to pretending that print journalism was still on a ventilator and not one final shovel of dirt away from burial. But it doesn't appear to be good news in any event. The patient is dying. The end is near.   This past week was terrible for traditional sports journalism. The Sporting News laid off folks, including Ryan Fagan, who I've mentioned a few times on this blog and was basically the face of TSN for me. Then the news about SI laying off virtually everyone appeared. I knew the faces of a couple of the writers who are losing their jobs there, too, thanks to social media. This is crushing. And this type of stuff is a re...

 I know I've written about the weather a lot the last week or two. It's January. Weather is about the only thing going on this month. It's generally cold in almost the whole country right now from what I gather, but, per usual, we're off the charts here. The lake-effect snow dump isn't as bad as it was in Christmas 2022, but we're in one of those "when's it going to end" stretches. It certainly doesn't help when the weather forecast tells us the lake effect will be gone once Thursday's here and then magically changes to "expect 3-5 more inches (more like 7-8)" with not a word about the previous forecast. That's we're I am right now as I write this. Yeah, yeah, I know, just get to the cards (spoiler: there are only two), but you can scroll, right? Here's a look at how much the weather has dominated this week:   That's the little bird house/bird feeder set-up my wife has in the backyard (that middle lump is one of th...

  I picked up some manager cards last month in a Twitter sale (I've decided I'm going to call that site "Twitter" until it dies). They were all from a period when I was not collecting, 2001 and 2002.   The 2001 ones are above, if you're as clueless about cards as I was then.   Here are the ones from 2002:   These are all very nice and most are brand-spanking new to me -- if I ever want to collect a set where every card is new-and-fascinating, well 2002 Topps is a good place to start. This period beginning in 2001, I believe, is the start of the third manager card invasion, which lasted until Topps booted managers to Heritage about 10 years ago and now they've whitewashed the job off of cards altogether, except for sporadic appearances in A&G and such.   But speaking of "manager card invasions," this made me remember the post I wrote about the "second manager card invasion," which was the 1980s (and into the early part of the '90s)....