Night Owl Cards

There are certain topics that circulate through the blogs over and over again. Sometimes the same topic comes in bunches, only to disappear for awhile, and then re-emerge a year or two later when new blogs start up. One of these topics is finding cards of players on teams for which you never knew they played. It pops up repeatedly. Jose Canseco as an Expo is often cited. Al Oliver as a Dodger is another one. There are probably many more that I forget. I decided to finally do a post on this, just to keep my blogger license. You have to write about this topic -- and players with goofy hair -- or "they" will come and find you and tell you can't waste your time rambling about cards anymore. I didn't have a lot of time to dig up cards, so I went directly to my Topps Traded sets, since that's where a lot of these examples occur. I don't have all the Traded sets, or even half of them -- including some pretty common issues, like from the late '80s. So I k...

I am not the most positive person in the world. Even when the Dodgers make seemingly intelligent decisions like they did today -- scrapping Scrappy McScrapperson, Ryan Theriot, after only a couple of months to land a much needed middle reliever -- I expect it to come with a catch. Instead of being relentlessly upbeat, I am relentlessly examining the fine print. So even though I haven't been as happy to see a former Giant come over to the good side since Brett Butler changed his evil ways, I'm certain the bad news will come in the form of a pudgy strikeout machine that is now the Dodgers' starting second baseman. Sure, Uribe can come through in the clutch -- he's demonstrated that against the Dodgers -- but there is a whole lot of padding his un-base percentage in between. But that's me being negative again. I'm trying to cure that character flaw. It's hard to do so when being negative actually produces positive results. In fact, very recently, I won a...