Night Owl Cards

I've written a few times that the first sports publication that came to my house was Sports Illustrated in 1976. Because of that, I have all of the SI covers from that year memorized, even for sports that I didn't have a clue what they were at the time. SI cover subjects like Steve Cauthen (horse racing?) and Dwight Stones (high jumping?) are etched in my brain. Of course, the baseball covers were the only ones I cared about, and there were some classics on SI fronts that year, the famed Red Sox-Yankees fight, the George Brett cover boy photo, George Foster staring ominously at the reader as the playoffs approached, and, of course, Reggie as an Oriole. I've known about Reggie Jackson's one season as a Baltimore Oriole since that very year, also the first year I really paid attention to baseball. Even though I didn't follow the sport much during his Oakland A's days, it was still unusual to see Jackson as an Oriole that season. Pending free agency was ...

Just because I'm old doesn't mean I don't enjoy new experiences with cards. I dabble in them all the time; I still like sampling and trying out things. How do you explain that pack of Bowman I bought last week? (Oh, didn't I tell you about that? That's an indication of how impressed I was). No, if I was truly finished with new experiences, you'd see nothing but pre-1980 cards here and a complete unwillingness to understand modern cards and card strategies, rather than the semi-unwillingness to understand modern cards and card strategies that you already see. Why just in the last few days I've experienced a couple of "new-to-me" moments. The first has to do with the card you see up top. It is a 2007 Fleer Ultra gold parallel (not to be confused with "gold medallion") of Nomar Garciaparra. It's even numbered to /999 in that dot-matrix way that Ultra serial-numbered things. But the "new" part is that I received ...