Night Owl Cards

  I wrote a month or so ago that I've been working on a post on the 1991 Studio set. Based on the information provided by players on the back of that set's cards, could a personality profile be developed for the average Major League Baseball player in 1991?   I went through all 264 cards. For most of the cards, there are four categories listed on the back that allows you to know the player a bit more than the photo on the front: personal (birth date, family, place of residence), career, hobbies & interests and heroes.   I focused on the last two categories because they are the best window into a ballplayer's world in 1991.   I separated those two categories into six separate sub-categories: Hobbies & Interests, Music Interests, Collecting Interests;  Favorite Sports Teams; Heroes and Favorite TV Shows. Then I started tallying. When I was done, I came up with the Average Major League Player in 1991. Based on the most popular answers, this is what that pl...

 (Today begins the first day of "easy season" in my job. "Easy season" isn't as "easy" as it once was, but I need to focus on the fact that I won't be typing in 48 school-game roundups per day for the next three months. Let's get to Cardboard Appreciation. This is the 340th in a series):   One of the things I miss the most about trading cards from the 1950s through the 1990s is the personality of the players coming off of the cards.   Card backs were for finding out who was behind that face on the front. In the early going, from the 1950s through the 1970s, you could get some inside information about the player from a cartoon or a short write-up. The cartoons from specific sets like 1956, 1970, 1973 and 1974 Topps baseball and great oddball sets like Kellogg's, which dared to ask what players' hobbies were, made ball players human, guys you could relate to -- they were just like you in a lot of ways. They liked to draw, they liked to wa...

Baseball cards might be the most hostile environment for black-and-white images. We will fawn over black-and-white paintings, marvel at black-and-white photography framed on a wall, present awards to black-and-white movies, but don't you dare give us a baseball card set full of black-and-white players. Black-and-white photos do appear in sets these days, but it's always confined to a limited number of cards. Take this year's Stadium Club as an example. There are select black-and-white photos that collectors have oohed and aahed over, but the majority of the set is in color. That's the way it's been, for decades and decades. If you're going to do black-and-white, keep it to a limited number of cards, and for the love of cardboard, don't make the entire set black-and-white. One of those Stadium Club cards got me curious. How many black-and-white sets could I find since the days when full color photography made its entrance? I went through my Dodgers b...

Ah, the early '90s. Once, ballplayers were simply ballplayers. They ran, hit and threw. That's all. Once they left the field, a few of them signed autographs before disappearing into nothingness, only to reappear the next day (or night) to run, hit and throw again. At least that was the world that was painted for us in baseball cards. Things began to change slowly in the 1980s. Card backs, specifically, introduced collectors to the more personal side of baseball players with blurbs that might reveal a family or a hobby. The glamorization of ballplayers increased rapidly from there. By the 1990s, they were full-fledged fashion models, thanks to some of those Stadium Club and Bowman abominations featuring players in collared shirts and slacks. But perhaps no set provided better insight into the ballplayer's "inner self" than Studio. Everyone remembers the portrait-style photos on the front. Studio captured the Olin Mills feel quite well. Awkward. Uncomf...