Night Owl Cards

A few days ago, Tony L. from Off-Hiatus Baseball Cards dug up a Baseball Digest from 1977 and displayed an article that asked: "Don Sutton: Will he be the best Dodger pitcher ever?" This was the time period when Baseball Digest was coming to my home and I'm fairly certain that I read that article when I was 11 years old. I knew about Koufax and Drysdale then, but I was probably nodding my head in agreement: yeah, Sutton could become the best Dodger pitcher ever. You all know what happened next after that Baseball Digest article. Sutton pitched the Dodgers to back-to-back World Series appearances. He got into a well-publicized fight with teammate Steve Garvey. He sought big free-agency bucks after the '79 season and became a Houston Astro. After that, he pitched for the Brewers and the Angels and the A's and it was never the same. Forget about the "Best Dodger Pitcher Ever" stuff, that's for sure. Koufax's title was safe as far as I wa...

Back in June I received a varied and wonderful package from Eric and in it were a few old Baseball Digests. I've pulled out those magazines because I have a reading holiday coming up (any vacation is the only chance I get to actually read magazines and books anymore), and I want to absorb these magazines from my childhood as well as those way, way before that. When I showed those magazines the first time, I announced that they had given me an idea for a post and that you would see it in the future. I normally never announce that kind of thing unless the idea is really good and that I'm pretty sure I won't forget it. Well, guess what? I forgot it. And I didn't write it down either. So all I'm left with is showing the innards of this here Baseball Digest from September, 1955. This is what I'll be reading in a few weeks. So let's have a sneak peek: There are very few pictures in a Baseball Digest from the 1950s, and, of course, the few that exi...

When I was a kid, my brother and a couple of friends of ours would pretend we were radio hosts. As kids from the '70s, the best way to do that was to use your parents' cassette recorder (the one with the carrying handle with the big buttons in the front). And to jazz up your recordings, every once in awhile we would record what we heard on the radio and mix it in with what we said. The way we did this was to push the cassette recorder as close to the radio speaker as possible. We thought this was the height of innovation and we were quite proud of our work. We'd listen to those tapes over and over. One time, one of us said something into the recorder and added "let's see what the man on the street has to say." Then we turned on the radio and recorded the first words we heard. Those words were "it's the spice of life." That threw us into hysterics. Absolute hysterics. Imagine two boys and two girls, ranging from age 8 to 12, lying on the ...