Night Owl Cards

  I received this card at the end of last year from Kenny at Torren' Up Cards. It's a Leaf-something-or-other card featuring infielder Trey Sweeney and his autograph but in a very generic setting. Because of no logos, it was easy for Kenny to say that the card was now a Dodger card because the Dodgers had acquired Sweeney from the Yankees in a trade. But Sweeney didn't stay with the Dodgers very long. He was traded during the deadline period to the Tigers in the Jack Flaherty deal. And Sweeney has been playing for the Tigers in the postseason. So this is now a Tigers card, which means I can send it to a Tigers collector. I happen to know a few of those. Hmmm, who should get it? I thought of this card while opening a package I received last week from Cardboard Catastrophes . Inside was an Oklahoma City team set -- OKC is the Triple A team for the Dodgers. Trey Sweeney was one of the cards. This is Sweeney closer to being a Dodger than on that Leaf card. You can see the ...

  I picked up some manager cards last month in a Twitter sale (I've decided I'm going to call that site "Twitter" until it dies). They were all from a period when I was not collecting, 2001 and 2002.   The 2001 ones are above, if you're as clueless about cards as I was then.   Here are the ones from 2002:   These are all very nice and most are brand-spanking new to me -- if I ever want to collect a set where every card is new-and-fascinating, well 2002 Topps is a good place to start. This period beginning in 2001, I believe, is the start of the third manager card invasion, which lasted until Topps booted managers to Heritage about 10 years ago and now they've whitewashed the job off of cards altogether, except for sporadic appearances in A&G and such.   But speaking of "manager card invasions," this made me remember the post I wrote about the "second manager card invasion," which was the 1980s (and into the early part of the '90s)....