Night Owl Cards

I had to do a little bit of research for this post, only because I am so clueless about cards that others of a certain age treat with such reverence. I recently received a supertrader package from P-town Tom of Waiting 'til Next Year . The package was filled with super variety, everything from oddballs to junk wax to shiny stuff to a couple of autographs. But when I trimmed it down to the cards I needed, a lot of what was left were cards I am not familiar with at all. Included in that were several Panini Donruss cards and the brand's tributes to the exclusive cards that Donruss made back in the '90s, when I wasn't collecting. The above card is Panini's recognition of the 1992 Donruss Elite Series (again, I'm not an expert on this '90s stuff, so if I mess something up, let me kn ... oh, who am I kidding? You'll let me know). You can see how shiny and refractory it is with squares going off everywhere. Looking up a few Donruss Elite Series cards...

Until a couple of weeks ago, this green-tinted parallel of Dodgers prospect Zach Lee was the only card I had from the debut set of Topps Heritage Minors in 2011. Although I enjoy minor league sets, it's more for their kitsch value. The old cards, the wacky poses, the ball girls and trainers, spotting some well-known major leaguer just starting out in the bowels of professional baseball. But Heritage Minors I'll probably never understand and definitely never purchase. The cards come at a bit of a premium because they're on Heritage card stock, yet they're still a bunch of nobodies. They don't deserve that fancy stock. That's for major league players. Along with that, I'm being asked to spend my hard-earned money on a bunch of guys who will probably never amount to anything on an MLB level. Yeah, I know, prospecting is about finding that needle in a haystack, but I'm much too poor for that nonsense. So, all I've got then are guys who played ba...

I expect this post to receive an ungodly number of hits. It's not because I'm showing a photo of the gold medal-winning Netherlands field hockey team, the consensus "best-looking team in the Olympics," as determined last July by about 462 different online publications, all of whose employees are apparently not getting their -- ahem -- needs met. It's because I included the words "Netherlands" and "field hockey team" together with the words "trade" and "post" in the blog title. The web bots love the word "post," and I'm suspicious that they like the word "trade," too. Throw in guys who love gals in tight outfits and sports bras, as well as those who have a thing about mismatched shoes, and, well, I can kiss the November readership blahs goodbye. I'm going for the record here. Welcome to another post where content is meaningless in the eyes of blogging stats. The real reason I trotted o...

AP If you're a Dodger fan and you're still trying to absorb this weekend's trade and what it all means, then, welcome to my little club. I call it "The Ghost of George Steinbrenner Has Possessed My Team." I have never witnessed such a gambling acquisition of star players since Steinbrenner was in power with the Yankees. It's a fantasy league trade. It's a trade dreamed up in comic books. It's crazy. It's bizarre. I'd almost say it's ridiculous, but I'm hoping that somebody in upper Dodger management knows what he's doing. I don't know how to feel because I've spent virtually my entire baseball-rooting career bagging on a certain team for buying players. It feels kind of good, but it feels kind of bad. And it all feels kind of unsettled. Throw in the fact that when Fox owned the Dodgers, it tried to do something like this on a slightly less grand scale and it exploded in every Dodger fan's face. I'm not ...

I've heard the complaints from Wordpress users who say they aren't able to comment on Blogger blogs anymore, or are only able to through a great deal of effort. That's tough to hear. I like comments. But even a Blogger user like me has noticed the comment set-up isn't the way it used to be -- Blogger is tinkering with something for some unknown reason. But I have a different complaint about Blogger and it has to do with following blogs. I follow many, many card blogs. Blogger lets you officially only follow 300 (why, I don't know), but if I could follow more I would. I have been at the maximum for probably a couple of years now. Not being able to follow as many blogs as you want is a minor inconvenience, but for a long time it wasn't too difficult to handle. If a new blog came along, I would merely search out a blog that hadn't posted in like a year, delete that blog from my following list, and add the new blog. That way I'd still be at the 300 n...