Night Owl Cards

I am convinced that when I am a night owl of advanced years, living at the friendly, neighborhood old folks home, losing bits of my memory every day, my knowledge of baseball card minutiae will be the last to go. I probably won't retain much in those days. My daughter's married name? Gone. My favorite foods? Gone. But I will still remember Phil Garner's reverse negative 1982 Donruss card and Glenn Hubbard's '84 Fleer snake photo. Another example of that steel trap collector's memory exhibited itself as I was sorting the 1981 Topps Traded set (yes, I'm still writing about this thing). As I mentioned before, the vast majority of the cards in this set are all new to me. I've never seen the cards before. But then I came across this card of Bill Fahey, a career-long backup catcher for a variety of teams. "Wait a minute," I thought. "I've seen this card before. I've seen this photo before. Did Topps repeat Fahey's card?" ...

Even though the Dodgers won the World Series in 1981, I'm not going to pretend that '81 was a great year, because it wasn't. For those of you who weren't around then, there was the baseball strike, the horrific Hyatt Regency walkway collapse, and a plague of assassination attempts. Music was an atrocious wasteland. For every Tattoo You or video on fledgling MTV, there was Endless Love (and it was endless) , Kenny Rogers croaking "Lady," and I Love a Rainy Night, I Love a Rainy Night, I Love a Rainy Night, I Love a Rainy Night, I Love a Rainy Night (that was the whole damn song). As a teenager glued to my radio, it seemed that just as one horrible song had run its course, another horrid song took its place. Celebrate Good Times, Come On? Not if Bette Davis Eyes kept staring me down from my stereo speakers every half hour. The year was filled with normal teenage angst for me, and baseball cards were there to ease my pain, much as they are today. Those c...

If you are of a certain age, then you have probably played this game: Pick a random year when you were young. Determine your age during that year. Now calculate how old your parents were during that year. Were they older than you are now? Were they younger ? Are you FREAKED OUT yet? I recently did this for 1981. I was a teenager smack in the middle of high school. My father was a hair older than I am now. My mother was a couple years younger. So, whatever they were going through in 1981 is probably pretty similar to what I'm going through now. Except that they were busy trying to ignore cable television while I'm busy trying to ignore the latest generation of the iphone (I think I'm about 4 generations behind). In '81, they were caught up in whatever real life issues that were going on that year. But I was just beginning to absorb that stuff. I first heard about the shooting of President Reagan on a radio in the back of the school bus taking me home. News of the ...

I don't know the average age of a card blogger. But if I had to guess, I'd say it's in the early 30s somewhere. That's based mostly on what I gather from the blogs, the love for the junk wax of their childhood, the appreciation for '90s cards I never knew, and the consideration that any card prior to 1983 is practically ancient. In fact, there have been countless posts pointing out the strange appearance of players on cards from the '70s and early '80s. The facial hair, the awkward poses, the general cheesiness (a word, by the way, that we never used growing up in the '70s). But it's difficult for me to see what they see sometimes. I grew up in the '70s and early '80s. I have those cards committed to memory. None of these cards are cards that I've seen for "the first time." And the poses and looks of the players were just what went on at the time. It didn't seem strange to me at all. I know the cards so well that I'...