Night Owl Cards

This post isn't about the weather, even though it is zero degrees outside right now, and it's still four days away from the first day of winter. It's more about the Dodgers' offseason maneuvering and the general disinterest I have in my team's transactions. Yes, other teams have been more active than the Dodgers. As usual, the Red Sox and Yankees are acting like hyperactive kids who can't endure a quiet moment. They have to do SOMETHING or they will be forced to deal with their insignificance. The Phillies and Braves are their usual industrious selves. And teams like the Rangers, Orioles and Mariners are surprisingly busy bees this offseason . Meanwhile, every Dodger transaction has come with a string attached. And the other end of that string is attached to a dollar bill. The Dodgers just aren't going to sink a bunch of cash into a major star. It's not going to happen, which is why I can't even look at fan message boards anymore. I can't dea...

You thought I was going to post about blue refractors didn't you? Sorry, we're going in an entirely different direction. The Dodgers clinching a postseason berth tonight got me thinking about why I like the team. And while a lot of that can be explained by card collecting and the fact that the Dodgers were one of the top teams around when I was a child, there's more to it than that. My appreciation for the Dodgers comes down to history -- Brooklyn Dodgers history, and more specifically, the Boys of Summer. Roger Kahn's book, "The Boys of Summer," based on the 1952 Brooklyn team, stayed with me more than any other book I read during college. And I read a lot of books in college. Kahn's book was like "Ball Four" and "The Bronx Zoo," in that it finally depicted players as people and not mythic legends. And while that idea may seem to contradict the practice of collecting pictures of players on little squares of cardboard, I don't thin...