Night Owl Cards

The December/January edition of Beckett Vintage Collector came to my house Saturday. Yup, I've subscribed to the thing -- I should ensure that it stays in business if I'm writing for it, right? Asking for free copies all the time doesn't help them pay my salary. The latest edition should start appearing in stores and at magazine racks in the next couple of weeks. And, once again, I have a story in it. This is my fifth story for the magazine this year, something I didn't quite expect when the first one was published back in January. It's still very cool and I hope to keep it going for as long as they want me and I have topics. This edition's topic is subsets: You remember subsets, right? Well, maybe you don't. Subsets went out of style by the mid-1990s and that's already 25 years ago. Subsets were replaced by inserts, which were popular with both collectors and card companies -- card companies because now they could make collectors cha...

One of the most dangerous things you can do when communicating with a journalist is to tell him or her a piece of key information and then say they can't tell anyone what they've just been told. My first reaction in this scenario is to think: "Who do you think you're talking to?" Whoever spilled that piece of information should now be aware that the journalist is going to do everything in their power to make sure they tell everyone what they've just been told. And that brings me to a package I received from the preeminent Tim Wallach baseball card collector, Corey. In that package, he spilled some really juicy beans regarding his collection. And then said I can't tell anyone. I really would like to tell you. But, nope, I can't. So we'll just move onto the cards and I'll ignore that voice in the back of my brain with every fiber of my being. Here is some '90s parallel action. This is back when parallels were forme...

The 2009 O-Pee-Chee set is filled with spectacular cards such as this. Marvel for days over the heavyset cameraman, or the Minute Maid Park logo (mmmmm, oranges!), or whether that's Cecil Cooper crouched in the dugout. But the most obvious feature of this card is current Brewers manager Craig Counsell's batting stance. How in the world did he hit anything like that? The immediate answer is the snarky one: obviously, he didn't. He batted .226 in 2008. It says so right there on the back of his baseball card. But it's interesting to me how many changes a player must go through to stay in the major leagues. Batters, especially those who aren't naturals at the plate, are forever fiddling with their stances, maybe not to such a severe degree as Counsell, but you have to adapt to survive. It makes me think of my own batting stance when I was a youngster. My stance was the same -- it never changed, except only when I was imitating the stances of famous baseball...

Perhaps you've heard that 1.8 percent of major league baseball fans are happy because the Giants won the World Series again. As you can imagine, I'm part of the 98.2 percent that is not happy. In the least. I can't bring myself to say it was a great postseason or Series or any of that 'yay, baseball!' stuff because I'm too INVESTED. Also, I'll never get used to the fact that a team that ended the season six games behind gets a World Series trophy. That's regardless of whether it's the Giants or not ... OK, it annoys me more that it's the Giants ... but, really, baseball what are you doing to yourself? I know it's irreparable and most fans have moved on and the other sports have been dealing with this for a long time since way back when I was a child, but six games behind, man. Six. Games. Behind. Anyway, it's another lost postseason and to add to that joy I've worked 15 days straight and there's no real certainty about my n...