Night Owl Cards

  It's been more than a year since I did one of these. There are reasons for that: These posts are brutally time-consuming and I should do posts like this in shifts, but I haven't learned to do that. Also, I'm covering a time period in which I didn't collect and also a time period in which set-collecting was going out of style.   But I'm plowing through, at least for another year.   It's 1997 and that sound you hear is me opening a single pack of Topps and thinking "well, that's enough of that."  That's all I did in collecting in 1997. But it was more than I did in 1996, which was absolutely nothing! For me, 1997 is about taking a job that I still have and preparing for the arrival of our first kid. All to the theme of "I get knocked down, but I get up again, you're never gonna keep me down." (Yeah, I know, you hate that song). Like in 1996, far too many sets were issued in 1997 and a whole bunch of them couldn't even muster 4...

As you might know, the Baseball Writers Association of America will be releasing their selections for the Baseball Hall of Fame this week. The news has kind of been on the internet a few times. In the past I've gotten a little irritated at the critics of the Hall and the BBWAA and gone on a few rants. While I agree that there are chiefly flaws in the voting rules that prevent deserving players from entering, I am now far more irritated by the nonstop bitching from both sides about the who, what, when, why and how of everything Hallish. It's too much talk, it's too much emotion, it's too much angst and it's gone on too long. So, this year, there won't be a rant. Because it's just a Hall of Fame. That's all it is. A building with some fancy plaques. Some people say certain players get in it and that's all. But whether the players get in or they don't, they're still talented players. They wouldn't be considered if they didn't ha...