Night Owl Cards

  One game-changer to writing my own blog was that no cards seemed to be out of my reach anymore.   What had seemed unattainable before was surprisingly doable, thanks to reader generosity and simply the publicity the blog has given me.   I've reminded myself of that blog phenomenon over and over and tried to rid myself of the "oh, I'll never be able to finish that" mind-set that has been my safety net against disappointment in this hobby for decades.   But there are still impossible quests. No one will be able to convince me that they are not.   The main one is completing the 1952 Topps Dodgers team set.   Supposedly it can be done. It's not like one of the cards is a 1 of 1. But it's still impossible to me.   Every collector knows about cards 311-407 in the 1952 Topps set, the high-number series in which many of the cards were off-loaded into the ocean because all the unsold cases were taking up warehouse space. The surviving fourth-series cards, alr...

Several bloggers have taken the latest blog bat-around challenge and come up with several very sensible ideas in the event that they ended up the commissioner of major league baseball. I agree with some of the ideas. I don't agree with others. But, overall, they are logical, and I could see many of them working within the structure of today's major league baseball rules. (Well, except for this one ). I am going to go in a different direction. I'm not going to consider the current framework of major league baseball. Screw the current framework. In a lot of ways, it's the reason for the current problems. No, instead, what I propose is a complete overhaul of major league baseball. It will be messy. It will be chaotic. It is guaranteed to piss people off. It's unrealistic and totally unenforceable. But if I want baseball to be the way I want it to be, then it's going to have to happen. If I was commissioner and these rules were enacted, I'm sure I'...

I am trying to keep these Brush With Greatness posts to baseball while there are still some baseball players left to feature. But I will make an exception for this one card. First, the card was sent to me by Ben of Cardboard Icons . It's fancy, shiny, over-the-top, all of that, and it must be recognized. Secondly, it's a card of a player that I covered when he was in high school. And to see him on a trading card -- even though he is entering his fourth season in the NFL -- still blows my mind. Brian Leonard was just a goofy kid from a school that sits literally in the middle of nowhere. The school is located in a town built along a single road. There are several stoplights along the way, but if you leave the main road and travel to the left or the right, you are in countryside in less than 5 minutes. The town is in the largest county east of the Mississippi River. It's very sparsely populated, on the northern edge of the Adirondack Mountains. Most of the high schoo...

This was meant to be a simple trade post featuring some fantastic cards sent to me by Wicked Ortega . But as Tina Turner once said, "we nevah, evah do nothing nice and easy." So get ready for a "nice and rough" post through my scatter-brained, rolling on the river mind. I opened the package from Wicked about a week or so ago. As usual it contained plenty of fantastic cards from that bottomless well in southern Florida. There were want list needs, Upper Deck disasters from 2010, relics, and this card: That is a 1954 Bowman of Billy Cox, the third baseman of "The Boys of Summer," Brooklyn Dodgers. It's terrific. I've owned only one '54 Bowman in my entire life, although I once had a chance to buy a handful and stupidly turned down the guy flat. So the awesomeness of finally holding a Dodger '54 Bowman in my hand did go through my head. But the first thing I thought of was the first thing I always think of when I think of ...