Night Owl Cards

    I posted this card last night in response to a Twitter request to "post a baseball card." It seemed like an appropriate response that wasn't the freakin' Ripken F-face or '89 Junior card yet again. I hope everyone knows the '75 Rudy May by now, even if it's just by me mentioning it a couple dozen times. It's truly bizarre in the most wonderful way and all comes together as a happy accident, right down to May's mournful face. But what I keep thinking about when I see this card is "how did they get that logo so wrong?" The Yankees logo isn't that difficult to replicate. I remember trying to draw my own baseball cards as a kid, down to the logos on the hats. The Yankees logo wasn't an issue. Sure, it wasn't Cincinnati Reds easy but it wasn't that blasted Detroit Tigers logo either. Throw a few more brush strokes in there, English D. Here is the standard Yankees logo. A wide "N" with the end "legs" curv...

I enjoyed Cardboard History's recent look at the history of chronicling NBA expansion teams on cardboard. I'm not much of a pro basketball fan, but I knew this would be something I could translate to baseball. The way card companies, and Topps in particular, have documented Major League Baseball expansion is something I've always been aware of through the years and it would be interesting to see the progression all in one place. So I looked through my collection and then I filled in the blanks with scans from the internet and I'm now ready to show you how expansion teams were shown that first year of each franchise. Basically, card companies have used four different ways to feature those teams: 1. List the player with his new expansion team but hide the old uniform in the photo and show the player without a hat. 2. List the player with his new expansion team but airbrush the player's hat so the old logo or old team's colors aren't showing. 3. L...

We're just three months shy of the 40th anniversary of the advent of free agency in major league baseball. No matter what you may think of that development and the consequences over the following decades, you cannot deny Marvin Miller's impact and how he brought the basic concepts of organized labor to MLB players. Today, on Labor Day, I'd like to go back to that time of early free agency, specifically the first real group of free agents. Free agency began in December 1975 when arbitrator Peter Seitz ruled in favor of Andy Messersmith and Dave McNally, who had requested to be free agents. From that point, players were allowed to seek out better contracts from other teams. The offseason of 1976 featured the first group of genuine free agents. And 25 of those players signed new deals with other clubs. It was a brand new world. Players were paid record salaries. Teams who had little hope to contend, like the Angels, Padres, White Sox and Rangers, suddenly looked li...