Night Owl Cards

  I keep forgetting to acknowledge TCDB and their members for voting my blog as "Favorite Blog" again this year. This makes it five years in a row and six out of the past seven. "Favorite blog" seems like an outdated award even to me -- sounds something like "favorite cassette tape" -- but it shows that people are still reading and still enjoying and it's nice to have that reminder. Or maybe it's like the Gold Glove award and people vote purely on reputation.   There is the medal table, except I get a crown. Now on to the honor that more people care about -- and they really do care about it. The Baseball Hall of Fame announced the baseball writers' selections for this year's Hall of Fame class. Three players are going in -- Ichiro, CC Sabathia and Billy Wagner -- joining the earlier committee picks of Dave Parker and Dick Allen. This means I need to update the Most Hall of Famers tally, which I'll get to when the 2025 class is inducted....

  I did my usual blog post ritual Tuesday, writing it up in the early afternoon and then setting a publish time for a few hours in the future.   The post did publish and it appeared on everyone's blog rolls, but it didn't show up on the blogger dashboard/reading list. That's happened periodically over the years and eventually it does show up. I waited and waited and it still didn't. It's on the reading list now if you go back a day or so on the dashboard, but I have a feeling some readers missed it.   So let's see what happens with this one. There's a weird synchronicity going on with the 1974 Topps set right now. Maybe that's not the right description but that's what I'm calling it.   For starters, it's the 50th anniversary of the first set I ever saw, the first cards I ever owned. I've written about that lots and have mentioned that it's the anniversary of my first baseball cards several times this year. One of the more recent ones...

  The Hall of Fame announced its 2024 class this evening (once upon a time this was held much earlier in the day) and thanks to the constant vote tracking online, there wasn't much of a surprise about who was selected. The most I heard about this class in the lead-up is whether Billy Wagner will make it (He didn't).   Wagner didn't play for the Dodgers. Neither did official HOF selections Joe Mauer or Todd Helton. I'm looking for Dodgers to get in the HOF, pretty much all I care about when it comes to HOF votes.   Fortunately, there is one who got in easily this year, Adrian Beltre. He won't get a Dodger hat on his plaque, but he played for them first and for more years than all but one team and even then it's just one additional year. I'm not irked by this as much as when Mike Piazza went in as a Met in 2016 (even "irked" is too strong a word, heck, "mildly miffed" is too strong). The key thing is, just like with Piazza, the Dodgers are ...

  I took a trip to Cooperstown and the Baseball Hall of Fame last week. It had been awhile, almost 30 years. It's ridiculous it's been that long, I've lived within easy driving distance of the town all my life. This was my fifth visit to the Hall of Fame but the first four were all before 1995. So I was way overdue. We took a nice couple hours drive through the autumn countryside, disembarked at a modest lakeside hotel and got down to touristing. I brought along a box of Chrome that arrived the day we left -- the less said about what was inside, the better.   The wife and I took the short walk up to the main drag that night for some dinner and to see what's changed over 30 years (not a lot). I could tell I was going to like this very much. The pleasantness of the people there can not be overstated.    I took a shot of the baseball standings outside the Hall since the regular season had just ended and I had to capture those 111 wins! So, after a couple of nonbaseball ...