Night Owl Cards

   I hardly ever play Immaculate Grid anymore. During its early days -- about a couple of years ago now -- I played fairly frequently. I enjoyed coming up with team combos for long-forgotten or hardly known players. Team combos were my thing.   At the time, the categories were mostly team combos and awards, which I could tackle fairly well. Then, about 100 days into IG, numbers categories started popping up. My brain doesn't retain numbers nearly as well as which player played on which team. Also, numbers remind me of homework, and, yes, the game started to feel like that.   So I mostly only play now when I see that one of the rows or columns is the Dodgers. I can find really obscure players in that category. Trying to get a low rarity score was always an objective for me when I played -- I can be the competitive sort -- so I like the obscure guys.    My ears perked up when a couple of Immaculate Grid users recently mentioned Jim Hutto. Hutto is a 1970...

I'm probably making a bigger deal about my appearance in Beckett's vintage magazine than some feel it warrants. Who cares, right? Nobody reads magazines anymore. It's not like it's Time or Sports Illustrated. Some old set from the '70s? You just have yourself that little party, old man. OK, I will. For me, from an early age, the folks whose names appeared as the bylines in magazines were even more fascinating and mysterious than the people they were chronicling. I saw pictures of the people being featured. I read their thoughts and learned their backgrounds. I knew stuff about them. The person writing it? I didn't know one thing about them. I read a lot of magazines as a youngster and into my teenage years and then in college. Time. Sports Illustrated. Inside Sports. Baseball Digest. Baseball Magazine. Life. Newsweek. The New Yorker. Mad. Cracked. Rolling Stone. Spin. National Geographic. Ranger Rick. Sesame Street Magazine. People. Us. TV Guide. Reader...

I'm in the middle of one of those life explosions. I think you know what I mean. Life goes along at its usual clip, alternating mild amusements with mild annoyances and then, suddenly, you're hit with a rapid-fire series of events that tests your ability to handle basic human tasks. That's where I'm at right now. I've got zero time for anything fun, and yet I was made aware yesterday -- in the middle of another life explosion -- that my name is on an article in Beckett Vintage Collector with the title "Pure Fun". Yes, I am a published magazine writer. Fun! I have been a published newspaper writer for three decades and I couldn't tell you how many articles that is. Thousands, for sure. A lot more than the number of blog posts I've written. But my name has appeared in a magazine just once before. It was a couple of years ago. It was a golf story, in a magazine that is issued by the same company that publishes the newspaper where I work. ...

The process of organizing my collection is an ongoing, year-round project for me. But I do more organizing during the last month of the year than at any other time. During November and December, I start cataloging and boxing up sets from the current year. The sets that I don't ever plan to add to go in boxes first and those 2016 sets are already there. Left in stacks are 2016 sets that should grow at least a little during the gift-giving season. Packs of Archives, Heritage, Stadium Club and Allen & Ginter are all on the ol' Christmas want list. But even those sets will likely be boxed up after the holiday; there is almost nothing from 2016 that I want to see in a binder. Meanwhile, I am undergoing an extra bit of organization thanks to the supplies that Dave recently sent my way. He sent both binders and pages and I've already put one of the binders to work. Yesterday, I paged my 1976 SSPC set. It looks absolutely fantastic, and since there is no printing on th...

(Welcome to my least favorite holiday of the year. Labor Day, a harbinger of the chaos to come around here, is merely a one-day reprieve for me, not a three-to-four-day cookout. But I suppose it could be worse: I could be out on the highways this weekend. Time for Cardboard Appreciation. This is the 245th in a series): Months ago, I boldly set a date for when I would start the Top 100 Cards of the 1970s Countdown. That date has since come and gone. And there's been no countdown. The entire month that housed that date has come and gone. And no countdown. I promise there still will be a countdown. One of the reasons for the delay is that there remainsl a couple of cards out there that I want to get because I think they probably would make the top 100. Another reason is I haven't finished compiling a list of the candidates for the final 100. Anytime I think about doing it, it seems like a chore. And I hate it when this blog becomes a chore. So I'll wait until i...

I grew up during the Topps monopoly. I was conditioned to wait for one set -- and one set only -- each year. I didn't mind. I didn't know any better, and I liked Topps' sets a lot. I was obsessed with them. And when other companies came along to challenge Topps, I considered them infiltrators. Topps was the one company truly qualified to produce baseball cards. But it's clear, even back then as a young adolescent, that subconsciously I wanted something more. This card of Mickey Mantle is the other item I received from Scott Crawford On Cards that I mentioned in the last post. Scott is the one who gifted me with the complete 1976 SSPC set that I will treasure forever (and I'm still attempting to catalog). A little while ago, he mentioned that there were some promo cards for this set, which I never knew. He said he had a Mantle that he could send me (the other promo cards are Hank Aaron, Catfish Hunter, Dave Kingman, Willie Mays and Tom Seaver). The pr...

I wasn't going to do this post because I've basically done it already (the perils of being in your eighth year of blogging). But on that very post, I rediscovered a comment requesting more cards of players chewing their cud. So, three-plus years later, departed blogger, your wish has been granted. Going through my brand new complete 1976 SSPC set, I discovered card after card of a player enjoying a fat wad of tobacco. This pleased me quite a bit because it confirmed what I knew about ballplayers when I was growing up. Part of what made the game of baseball baseball back then is that players (and managers and coaches) chewed tobacco. I admit I didn't know much about tobacco, other than that my mother hated it and players seemed to really, really like it. And that spitting was COOL! In the '70s, tobacco-chewing was the background of baseball, like vendors calling out their wares, or jets flying over Shea Stadium. It was part of the experience. And, then -- under...