Night Owl Cards

Yesterday, I was reminded again that Melvin Upton Jr. is a Blue Jay. It's difficult to keep track these days as players seem to be change scenery more and more often. And in this very "life goes too fast" year of 2016, I'm in a perpetual state of catch-up. It doesn't help that players like Melvin Upton Jr. are on a new team each year. It doesn't help that players like Melvin Upton Jr. didn't even have the same name he did less than two years ago! Yes, Melvin Upton Jr. started out on very different terms not so long ago. He played for a team formerly known as the Devil Rays. And Upton was formerly known as "B.J." That transition was marked by Topps in 2015, with a card in flagship and a card in Update: And a very helpful notation of the name change on the back of the Update card: That got me thinking about other name changes. I'm not referring to wholesale name changes, like David Arias transforming into David Ortiz,...

More on these guys later. Last week, in a fit of laziness/writer's block, I wondered who the scariest-looking players in baseball history were. I received a variety of responses. I will try to show most of them here. As I clarified in the comments, by "scary" I meant, "this guy looks like he wants to kill me" scary. So, although folks like Otis Nixon and Willie McGee and Zane Smith, look "scary" in an "unfortunate-but-his-mom-still-loves-him" kind of way, that's not what I was going for. What I was going for is this: Maybe Randy Johnson is "ugly scary," too. But there is no doubt that there were a few batters that feared for their life facing him. He had the ability, and he definitely had the look, which is the main point of this post. The intent was to find players so frightening-looking that it set the "human fear response" into motion. Like this guy. He certainly featured an intense look on the mound. Th...

I am here to alert you to a fine weekly baseball card feature on the most excellent Baseball-Reference.com Blog. I'll let the astute Andy do the rest of the talking about it: --------------------------------------------------------------------- From Andy at Baseball-Reference.com: The Baseball-Reference.com Blog has a new weekly feature covering baseball cards: http://www.baseball-reference.com/blog/archives/category/card-of-the-week Click on that link to call up the relevant posts. We would like to feature some of the excellent card blogs out there. If you would like to participate, please email me at 88topps at gmail dot com to direct me to one or two posts on your blog that you would like to have highlighted. It doesn't matter if they are recent or old, but they must contain scans of the front and back of a card that can be used on our blog (minimum size 400 pixels by 285 pixels.) If I choose to use your scans as the basis of a post, I will credit your b...