Night Owl Cards

(Today is "International Forgiveness Day," created by the World Forgiveness Alliance, which I'm told is a nondenominational educational foundation. I'd like to think I can forgive a lot of things. But the Dodgers bringing Chris Perez to the mound on International Forgiveness Day is really pushing my buttons. On to happier matters: This is Cardboard Appreciation, the 210th in a series): Brian from Play at the Plate pulled a fast one when he sent all those Dodgers cards from the turn of the century. One of the cards is the one you see here. It's actually not a Dodger card at all. It's an Astros card. But even a Rangers fan can recognize Gibby trotting to first with his fist upraised in the background. And the 1988 World Champions (or Chaions) were the Dodgers. And "Tommy" has got to refer to Lasorda, right? Looking at the card, it seems more Dodgers than Astros. So what do I do with this thing? Cards that go in my Dodgers binders are rese...

Back when I started this post a half a day ago, I was in a foul, foul mood. I had no time and I was in a state of perpetual pissed-off-ness. But I still felt the need to post, which is What I Do these days. The only problem was I was so angry that I didn't think I could write in a way that anyone would want to pay attention to what I was saying. So, I grabbed a stack of cards that I had received in a trade -- one of many that I haven't posted -- and decided to let the cards speak for me. In order to do that, I picked an especially great stack, one from John of Old School Breaks . He always knows how to find me something shiny from an era in which I didn't collect. I wrote a brief intro and somehow managed to get through it without mentioning the words "anarchy" or "dismemberment," and then uploaded a bunch of fancy cards without any further words. Well, some time has passed since then, and although I still don't have time and it's not ...

Way back when , I wrote a tribute to horizontal cards. In it, I said I'd break the tribute into two parts -- the pre-1992 cards that I displayed in that post, and the 1992-present cards that I said I would write in Part 2 sometime in the future. Well, months went by and Part 2 is one of the many, many ideas, promises, commitments and vows to be a better man that escaped from my brain during that period. I'm not here to pick up my forgotten vow to be a better man. But I am here to continue my look at horizontal baseball cards. Aren't you lucky. The thing about post 1991 horizontal cards is there are SO MANY of them. After a gap of 15 years without a single horizontal player card, Upper Deck opened the door for card companies to issue as many horizontal cards as they wanted. Soon after, just about every set featured sideways rectangular photographs. But for me, even though there's a lot of horizontal pics, it hasn't gotten old. In fact, if you'll remembe...