Night Owl Cards

It's been a very slow week at the mailbox. Just a solitary card package at the start of the week and then your usual assortment of boredom. I'm entirely to blame for this. It's much too busy in life to be ordering, packaging or sending cards. My want list remains in disarray after its disappearance almost two months ago. So I'm not exactly making myself welcome for people thinking of sending me cards. Also, there is this: I have a lot of cards. I can't tell you how many. I haven't figured that out yet. Let's just say "too many." Blogging for almost a decade will do that. So it's a little difficult to find something from my incomplete want list. But I encourage you, dear trade partner, to keep trying. Because I know better than anyone that I definitely need many, many cards. You never know when something is going to slip through. Let's take the one card package to brave my mailbox this week, for example. It arrived from Tony at ...

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 ...

A week or so ago, someone floated a trivia question -- I can't remember who, I saw it on Jayson Stark's Twitter account -- asking which four major league players have played a dozen years with one team, and only one team. The answer was Ryan Howard, Joe Mauer, Yadier Molina and David Wright. In the process, a number of other wrong guess revealed other players who have played at least a decade with one and only team: Justin Verlander (11), Felix Hernandez (11), Dustin Pedroia (10) and a few others. And then there was the surprise of the bunch: Andre Ethier, with 10 years with the Dodgers and only the Dodgers. Ethier started out with the Oakland A's, but never played for them, was traded in the 2005 offseason, and played his first game for the Dodgers in 2006. Since that time, dozens of players have come and gone in the Dodgers outfield, including the two players you see celebrating with Ethier up at the top -- Manny Ramirez and Matt Kemp. A few other outfielde...

There isn't a thing about the morning that I prefer over the night. My job and my personality dictate that I rarely wake up before 10 a.m. or hit the sack before 3 a.m. I prefer it that way. The morning to me is loud, abrasive, and much too bright. Alarm clocks are a horrible invention. The thought of an egg sandwich from a McDonald's drive-thru makes me nauseous. To me, coffee-drinking borders on cult-like behavior. And grim-faced 7 a.m. drivers appear all too willing to run you down. Morning TV news shows seem like a plot by a futuristic government: pummel these civilians with stories of death and human twistedness so that they're too demoralized to demand anything. I don't even like the sun shining from the east. The angle is all wrong. If I am up before 10 a.m., it's usually because of an illness, an automobile issue or another Very Adult Problem. Can we pleeeeease just dim the lights and all go to sleep 'til noon? Night, on the other hand, is w...

I received a care package from Commish Bob at The Five Tool Collector a couple of weeks ago. I think he's giddy about the O's being in the playoffs because with the exception of Andre here and a couple of others, the package was filled with oddballs! Here, take a look at this: It's a Korean night card! Woooooo! Please don't make me tell you more than that the card is from 2010. I have no time for research today. Also included was the 1989 Dodgers Police set, which is one of the team's police sets for which I didn't have a representative. Now I've got the whole thing! This set, of course, is important because it came out the year after the Dodgers won the World Series. So most of your favorite 1988 Dodgers are included. But since it came out in 1989, it tried to reflect the '89 Dodgers as much as possible. That's why there's a Willie Randolph card but not a Steve Sax card, because the '88 L.A. second baseman Sa...

The National has come and gone for another year and it still doesn't know me. I've never been and, realistically, I don't see myself attending for a long time. It doesn't have to do with location. Sure, if the National came to Syracuse or Buffalo, I wouldn't hesitate to zip over there for a day. But even Cleveland, Baltimore or Atlantic City are not far enough to be a deterrent. It doesn't have to do with cash. Even though I never have money in August, I could save up if I knew I was attending a year in advance. It doesn't have to do with work. Yeah, I have a limited amount of vacation time, but it's not so limited that I couldn't take off for a couple of days during the slowest part of the year. No, it has everything to do with family. I am married. With children. If you are married -- with children -- then you know where I'm going with this. When the summer comes, each member of the family wants to do certain things. There ar...

All right, I didn't get much response from yesterday's post, so I'm not going to believe anybody ever again when they cry about how kids don't collect anymore. I showed you that they did and obviously it's not that interesting to you. Granted, you might need to have kids and have been collecting for quite awhile to appreciate what the big deal was. So I thought I'd write about something else -- to which almost every male can relate: Babes. Yeah, you're interested now, huh? All I have to do is flash a picture of a pretty girl. I can read you like USA Today. Max from Starting Nine sent me another card package recently. He does a good job of finding stuff that I like and need. I've written plenty about that and you'll see those cards in a minute. But he also does a pretty good job of finding a pretty woman for me now and then. Yes, I'm happily married, and, no, he's not sending me actual women , no need to panic. But this doesn...