Night Owl Cards

  We card bloggers aren't the mushy type. If we're going to blog a Valentine's Day-themed post, it better be about Bobby or Ellis or Fred. Or at least show some red or pink parallels.   I've done it all before and don't have anything else clever to write about this fake holiday. So I thought I'd lean in all the way and show most of the cards from Bobby Valentine's career.   I collected Ellis Valentine's cards as a kid, I was always a fan. Fred Valentine was before my time. But Bobby Valentine has been there for the duration. His Topps card career (excluding the Mets managing days) nearly syncs up with my run of Topps complete sets, from 1970-92. He's only missing from 1970 and 1981-84.     He also reappeared in Panini Donruss last year with this weird thing in which it appears his uniform number slid down his jersey.   Finally, I have a connection to Valentine, as tenuous as it may be. I interviewed him just over five years ago , in a banquet hall, ...

When I first started this blog, I was searching for content. I didn't want the blog to be "look what I got" all the time, and besides, I didn't have all that many cards to boast about twice a day (I still can't believe I was posting twice a day). I decided one interesting series might be to relay the various encounters I had with major league baseball players. As a newspaper journalist, I had run into one or two, although I had never been an MLB beat writer or anything. I started the "Brush With Greatness" series and started posting those rapid fire, at least one a month for a couple of years. Then I ran out of those MLB subjects and started writing about interviews with athletes from other sports. Then I ran out of those and the series basically died. Or so I thought. Life is weird. You probably know that. Two days after my John Wockenfuss story appeared in the paper, I received a call at the office from a former high school and college bas...

There is one unmistakable truth about this major league baseball season: The Dodgers are a bad team. I'm OK with that. I expected it going into the season, although maybe not on this level. But it's OK. My focus is on seeing a brand new owner in the executive offices as soon as they can get McCourt to slither out of his gold-encrusted hole. What I'm not OK with is an unmistakable truth that has gone on for the last 15 years. The Dodgers cannot beat the Angels. Interleague play is bad enough without the Dodgers getting a six-game lesson in failure every year. How am I supposed to work up any enthusiasm for Selig's pointless gift to the fans when my team goes in the tank every June because they have a mental block over the Angels? The Dodgers just completed another futile series in Anaheim, scrambling to come back in the 9th inning to salvage one game of the three. They'll face the Angels again this weekend and we'll see what sub-.500 record they ar...

Lee Richard is officially launching a new segment on this blog. What's that make, about 300 features I've got going at once now? I don't care. Onward. I don't know very much about Richard, and I'm not going to spend any time looking him up right now. In fact, I'd prefer if the only thing I know about him is what I knew about him when I pulled this card as a youngster. And that thing is that "Bee Bee" has great speed. That's really all that needs to be said, isn't it? We thought this was very humorous. All those years of stats, all those numbers, and all Topps could come up with is that "Bee Bee," whoever the hell that was, had great speed. Years later, I look at that same sentence and know that what Topps was doing falls under the heading of "damning with faint praise." Topps really, really tried to find something complimentary to say about Richard, but when the player has spent that much time in the minors and...