Night Owl Cards

  Blogging in detail can take a lot of time and effort. I've got several observations and pick-ups to discuss and none of them are worth dedicating a whole post to -- so let's drag out the "housekeeping"' label and piece together a bunch of unrelated topics! I do that a lot, though not since 2024.   Up first is this terrific Hideo Nomo Dueling Dugouts insert from 1997 Pinnacle Inside. I've been intrigued by these from afar for a long time and finally received my first one last year (Karim Garcia on "the back" of the Vladimir Guerrero card). It was time to get a full-fledged Dodger one this time.   The kicker to these is you can turn the dial on the side and it shows the player's stats for that year in the center windows. So cool. Here is a look at the other years on this card:   Outstanding. Interestingly Nomo's stats with the Japan Pacific League's Kintetsu Buffaloes are shown for 1994 but 1993 is blank despite Nomo playing for the same ...

  I was surprised to discover that the last time I updated this series was more than a year ago .   I like writing this series, and it's not super work-intensive. But I also try to balance it out, so I'm not running these all the time. Apparently I balanced things out a little too much.   As a refresher, this is where I pick a card year or two and find players in that set who had just one card for their whole career. They didn't appear on a multi-player rookie card or in any other major set (I discount minor league issues and sets of that nature). They are true One-Card Wonders.   The last time I did this I said I wanted to wrap up the 1970s, so that's what I'm doing now. The last years to finish are 1972, 1973 and 1976.   The most surprising year here is 1972.   There are just four One-Card Wonders in the 1972 Topps set, which is 787 cards large. Interestingly, two are bunters.   #77 - Ron Theobald, Brewers #331 - Stan Swanson, Expos #366 - Jimmy Rosa...

(I took a couple of days off from the blog, The first day was because of work and the second was an extra bit of time to get past the negative vibes of last week, as well as to celebrate my daughter's birthday. I was going to make it three days off, but I received a nice phone call yesterday that got me back in the collecting spirit. Time for Cardboard Appreciation. This is the 350th in a series!):   I learned a couple of days ago that former Braves first baseman Jim Breazeale passed away earlier this month. He was 75 and had been dealing with heart issues for a few years.   There wasn't much social media notice about his death. I even checked over on the former Twitter, because there's still more people over there for some weird reason, but even then there wasn't much (and half of the mentions were bots/AI repeating the same sentence and link 🙄).   That's probably because Breazeale was a backup first baseman for a couple of years in the early '70s with the Bra...

  I'm already pleased with the brand-new collecting atmosphere on Bluesky as compared with Twitter. One excellent sign is I can find blog topics from the upstart site, which was a big Twitter benefit before it went south. The other day, the discussion turned to Roberto Clemente cards, and I realized that just about every vintage Clemente card that I have acquired comes with a story. I suppose that's a given with how treasured and expensive his cards can be, but it's just weird how the stories jump out with him. I don't know if I can say that about any other vintage player.   To demonstrate, I will go through each of my vintage Clemente acquisitions and the story that is attached to each. I don't have a lot of vintage Clementes, so this won't be long. Also, longtime readers have likely read these all before because I've recounted each of them on my blog when they happened. But this blog is about 70 percent regurgitation at this point anyway.   July 2024 1969 ...

  I went to a reunion of a local baseball team yesterday.  This was as local as a local team can get. It wasn't minor league ball, nor even semipro ball -- nobody was getting paid, I don't think -- it was just guys in college or just out of school playing on a team because they wanted to keep playing. They did that for three years, in the early 1970s, and then stopped. And they didn't reunite until yesterday, more than 50 years later. One of the players on those teams was Dave Trembley, who you may remember as the Baltimore Orioles' manager from 2007-10. He's a local guy. I've written about him in my Brush With Greatness series and a couple other times -- but that was awhile ago. He's retired now from major league ball, I believe. The organizers of the reunion started out wanting to recognize only Trembley for all he's done -- stuff like that doesn't happen regularly around here -- but he didn't want to be the center of attention. Only until it b...

  So, the October/November issue of Beckett Vintage Collector appeared in my mailbox on Saturday, right before I headed out the door for a few days. As mentioned earlier, the issue's arrival was delayed almost a month. I'm assuming it was mail or distribution problems, but no matter, it's here now. I wanted to see if one or both of the articles I had most recently written were in this issue, with the terrific Rickey Henderson cover. One of them was. And I was informed that the other one will show up in the December/January issue. This is the 17th article I've written for Beckett. I'm mostly impressed that I can still come up with topics. Who knows how long that will last. This most recent topic is one I've written about on the blog many times, and others have covered this set quite a bit, too. It's been 50 years since Topps released the 1973 Topps baseball set, much-discussed in blog circles (I mentioned that in the article). So when I got the green light to...

  I'm battling a dying keyboard on my laptop so I've been posting on my phone, both here and on the 1993 Upper Deck blog (new post over there, sorry I can't link right now!)   It's not fun, so posting has been/will be sporadic until there's a resolution. This also comes at a super-inconvenient time because I am working on not one but two Beckett articles this month.   The first one I will finish writing next week (I sure hope it won’t be on my phone). Then I'll start the next one. More on that later.   But first I want to do another Joy Of A Team Set post. I wanted to note another 1970s anniversary. A lot of that stuff happened 50 years ago now, you know.   I've already done a JOTS for the Swingin' A's, it was my very first Joy post. But what about the team the A's played in the World Series that year?   The 1973 Mets barely reached .500 but made it to the seventh-and-final WS game. That was a novelty then but fairly commonplace now with allowing...