Night Owl Cards

    Andrew McCutchen found a new team yesterday. He's a Brewer, continuing his tour through every team in major league baseball apparently. Not only has McCutchen bounced from team to team the last five years but many others have as well. The transactions on the baseball wire the past week are arriving rapid-fire as teams are making up for lost time. Then there's that practice of rotating players in and out of the lineup, up and down from the minors, that has grown in frequency the last few years. Nobody stays in place much anymore and it's very tough as a fan to keep up. You need alerts on your phone to keep track and then you'd promptly turn notifications off because the incessant beeping would drive you batty.   Not only is it difficult to stay on top of who is on what team but you're now required to keep track of prospects, too. The attention given to prospects is off the charts compared with what it was when I first got into baseball. Prospects were guys you sa...

I need to tie off some loose ends about a few different topics, so I'll do that here and then I'll show you some cards from Fuji later. The cards he has been sending out have been all over the blogs lately so what I'll be offering isn't anything new. So, some housekeeping: 1.   Thanks for your comments on the expansion post from last night. I do appreciate them and I know how fortunate I am to receive the amount of comments I do. Sometimes, particularly after a very research-driven post that takes hours and hours over several days, if I receive a comment that says nothing but "you forgot this," it rubs the wrong way. That's what happened yesterday, a few times. I should have a thicker skin but I think I wore it off pulling all those cards out of binders and looking up web sites, and typing, typing, typing. I don't expect praise in every comment, but, you know, "yes and ..." is a little more helpful than "yes but ..."....

During the recent Winter Meetings, the Dodgers were mentioned as being interested in the Pirates' Andrew McCutchen. I don't know how realistic that still is with the current crowd in the Dodgers' outfield, but I'd love to squeeze McCutchen in there. If L.A. could add Curtis Granderson and his termite-infested bat last year, they can find room for McCutchen. It would be a sweet post-Christmas gift. As for pre-Christmas gifts, McCutchen is already taking care of that for me. He's my Secret Santa! Ho! Ho! Ho! McCutchen, using the operator of the blog Collecting Cutch as his Christmas elf, sent me a glorious stash of Dodgers that happened to arrive at my door today, two days before the big day! That's cuttin' it clos ... er, right on time, mister! Besides Bowman Santa McCutchen above, let's see what else was in Cutch's big red sack: Here is McCutchen again, appearing all ghostly. That's because he's the Ghost of Christmas Prese...

The bad part about writing an almost daily blog is that sometimes you beat a topic to death so relentlessly that not even the scavenger owl that I am can retrieve anything from its lifeless carcass. I believe I've done that for 2016 Topps, and for 2015 Topps as well. So when two people -- Steve of The Card Chop and Julie of A Cracked Bat -- each send cards that are overwhelmingly packed with the latest from the last two years, there's just no more words. All that's left are semi-pretty pictures (or in the case of 2016 Topps, downright homely pictures). I'll make this quick. Cards from The Card Chop: The McCutcheon Perspectives card is fantastic. I don't understand the complaints about the lettering. If it looks like a cheap mid-1990s graphic, just pretend it's retro. ... The Kershaw, on the other hand -- bleeeaah. I don't need to see my superstars in action that close. And the gold netting is just not getting the parallels done. ... Mea...