Night Owl Cards

A member of The Infield is gone. The Dodgers announced today that Davey Lopes passed away at age 80. He was a central part of my earliest years as a baseball fan. That 1976 Topps Record-Breaker card is in the top 10 of cards that meant the most to me as a boy.   RIP. 

   I've written a few times over the last couple years about a collector I know. He was a co-worker. He didn't work in the same department but he used to come up to the office and we'd babble about cards.   Through the years he went from a collector who bought boxes and boxes of cards at the local Target/Walmart (I once encountered him and his girlfriend with a shopping cart full of blasters) to someone I saw at the monthly show with a table selling cards -- something that earlier on he couldn't see himself doing.   He died a week ago today. Heart attack. He was 53.   That is crazy young, younger than me. And all I could think of was a whole bunch of people that I see at card shows who are in bad shape -- much worse than the guy I worked with and often even younger. Since I heard about his death, it's been on my mind. Last weekend I went to an outdoor flea market and my mind fixated on the out-of-shape people, thinking "take care of yourself, dude!"   Core...

    I had another post planned for today, had the cards pulled and ready to scan, but death had other plans. You know the old superstition that notable deaths come in threes? Well how about finding out three well-known baseball figures of my younger days died within a 24-hour period? That's an unsettling ramp-up. It started yesterday afternoon and it's still going. Ken Holtzman. Gone. Whitey Herzog. Gone. Carl Erskine. Gone. All three have meaning in my young rooting life, Erskine the most obvious, though I never saw him play. I'll start with him because that's where I have the most to say.    Carl Erskine was on one of the first five 1956 Topps cards I ever owned. I've mentioned before that when we received a bunch of '56s from my dad's co-worker, my brothers and I split them up and decided that all the cards of each person's favorite team would go to that person (my one Orioles-loving brother got screwed). Erskine arrived with Newcombe, Randy Jackson, ...

    It's been a long time since I've written a post like this and thank goodness. These are the most crushing kind but also the most necessary. I woke up this morning to the news that Ben had passed away over the weekend . He was 43. Longtime blog readers probably remember him, he was the one who wrote Cardboard Icons , one of the OG blogs, it began two months before mine. I remember being excited to see his blog because he was a newspaper writer, his blog handle at the time was "Newspaperman". I found someone who understood my line of work. He got out of the business maybe a year or two later and, like me, wrote for Beckett magazine for a time. He moved on to work as a community service officer in California where he lived. Ben was very active in the hobby and on Twitter/X. He was up on the latest hobby trends and card sets. His collections were BIG to my eyes. He had a crazy collection of baseballs that had one thing in common -- they each had hit a major league ba...

  I wrote about my dog a fair amount in the early days of this blog. He was a terror then, leaving a path of destruction whenever we left the room. Nothing escaped his jaws, it certainly didn't have to be edible, and since this is a baseball card blog, you read about the times he destroyed some baseball cards.   He even went through some Christmas presents under the tree one year and tore out some card packs with his teeth. As the years went by, Dodger calmed down -- relatively speaking as he had beagle in his blood -- and was no longer a threat to cards. Just the other day last week, I happened to drop a couple of cards into his bed where he was sleeping without knowing I did it. I came back hours later to find them right where I dropped them, completely untouched. Dodger could barely see by then and his hearing was just as bad. He'd pace relentlessly even though his legs were wobbly and the health problems that he had lived with for years grew worse and more dire. On Sunday,...

I have been visiting my mom in the hospital for almost a week. Jackie Robinson's famous quote about "a life is not important except in the impact it has on other lives," celebrated today on Jackie Robinson Day, rings particularly true when you're thinking constantly about your mother who has an incurable disease. She definitely had an impact on my life and many others. What mother doesn't? So in honor of my mom and the day, I dug up 10 cards of Jackie Robinson in my collection that I have featured on the blog, that recognized Robinson's impactful feat of breaking the color barrier in 1947. Here they are: Jackie Robinson left us too soon. My mom will leave too soon. I guess the most impactful ones always do.