Night Owl Cards

Not a lot of time today. How about if I resurrect the '56 of the Month series? It's been a couple of months since I've done one of these. But I'm not changing the title to '56 of the Every-Third Month. Bill Bruton isn't here because he was a terrific forgotten hitter of the '50s, a standout contact man and base stealer for the powerful Braves teams of that era. He's here because he's the first player that I think of when the topic of "players who share the same name with people you know" comes up. I riffed on this topic once before , focusing entirely on players who share the same name as other famous people. I'm not going to go through the same rundown here because a) it takes way too much time that I don't have, and b) you don't give a fig about the nobodies that you don't know. So I'll just stick to Bill Bruton here. The Bill Bruton that I knew was a co-worker of my wife's back before my wife and I we...

I have completely butchered my timeline for this series, so I've decided to go at my own leisurely pace, which is how things should be done anyway. You can expect the No. 1 card back to be displayed sometime around the next presidential election. We'll all need the diversion anyway. Now, it's time for card back #17 and my thoughts and feelings about '57 Topps. Yeah, I know. You can click off to another blog now. I hear there's a contest going on somewhere. I always wondered what collectors thought when they opened their first packs of '57 Topps. The cards were much smaller than they were the previous five years. Did collectors think they were getting cheated? Perhaps the arrival of actual real photos in the set balanced out any issues with the smaller size. That had to be a plus. But what about the back? The backs looked a lot different than card backs in the previous Topps sets. They were more "serious." The cartoon took up only a small co...