Night Owl Cards

  Father's Day ended in pretty sucky fashion yesterday. Right in the middle of a dinner prepared to my specific requests, I heard hushed voices coming from my laptop over in the living room. I ignored it for a little bit -- I really like burgers and deviled eggs -- but it kept hushing and I had to go and check it out. There I saw people hunched over Mookie Betts, who was having difficulty getting up. I couldn't see the number so I couldn't tell who it was, I just knew it was a Black man. It didn't seem like Jason Heyward, not large enough. It didn't seem like Teoscar Hernandez, not enough beard. Finally I saw the name and, well, that's how you ruin Father's Day. Thanks a lot, Dan Altavilla, who I had never heard of until yesterday. I used to write about the Dodgers as a fan quite a bit on this blog. A lot of rah-rah rooting stuff. I moved away from it because I never felt comfortable with it and focusing more on cards seemed more natural. But I am still a Do...

By 1993, even dumb ol' me was waking up to the idea that the old collecting model wasn't going to work anymore. I couldn't possibly collect everything that was on store shelves at this rate. The objective every year since I started in 1975 -- find wax packs at stores, buy them -- was a solid purchasing model for years and years. But by the late 1980s, I couldn't keep up with all the sets out there and a lot of times I didn't care, and even in the years when I did try to buy them all, say 1991 and 1992, I was reaching the realization that this was stupid. So, in '93, I went into the collecting season with my eyes wide open. I would collect only what I knew or what appealed to me. And this is how the year went: Find Topps, buy Topps. Find Fleer, buy a little bit but I didn't really like it. Find Donruss, buy a little bit but I didn't really like that either. Find Score -- but it wasn't easy -- and buy it. Find Upper Deck and ... Holy smoke...