Night Owl Cards

There was a story out of Oklahoma City yesterday that the Dodgers are moving their Triple A affiliate from Albuquerque to Oklahoma City for next season. The Dodgers have been affiliated with Albuquerque for the last six seasons, and before that, the city and the Dodgers were together from 1972-2000. I grew up thinking that Albuquerque had been the top affiliate for the Dodgers for forever (although most of those great '70s Dodgers actually played Triple A games in Spokane, which was L.A.'s top affiliate throughout the '60s through 1971). Even though I've never been to Albuquerque, I don't like that the team is moving from there. The word is that Dodger management wants a better place to evaluate talent. Albuquerque, with its high altitude ways, has always been known for inflated batting stats, and that often doesn't translate to the majors. Of course that was an issue the first time the Dodgers were in Albuquerque (see Greg Brock/Mike Marshall), which ...

I've been on Twitter for three weeks now, and I have to say the second time around is going a little better than the first. Twitter can still be annoying as hell, but I think my approach to it is better this time. I've kept to my "rule" of only tweeting about cards -- for the most part -- and I've chosen to emphasize the usefulness of the tool, rather than the crap that's too easy to obsess over. One thing that Twitter is useful for is trades. That's not the reason I got back on there again. I'm not searching for new trade partners by any means -- I'm perfectly happy with the many that I have now and I can barely keep up with them as it is. But I've been involved in three or four transactions since my return to Twitter. Two of the fellow tweeters have card blogs. Two don't. The first Twitter trade (or #TwitterTrade, as the kids are saying) involved @SWLVguy , who charmed me with his friendliness and enthusiasm for cards right away....

A week ago, I received a Target red border version of the Dee Gordon Topps Update card and I got so excited that I announced to the world that the Gordon card -- in all its various versions -- was the card of the year. It's still the card of the year, no matter what biased Reds or Rockies or Giants fans may say. But I have to admit my excitement caused me to ignore the other cards that came with the Dee Gordon red border card. How scatter-brained of me. Now that I am thinking more clearly, I thought I'd show the rest of the cards sent to me by Chuck at Lifetime Topps. None of them are card of the year, but they deserve to be shown, too. Let's start with a Royals card, because I've come to expect random Royals cards in Dodger packages. The two teams' uniforms sort of look alike. Chris Haney is another one of those marginal guys who ended up on my fantasy baseball teams. I just couldn't get enough of 7.31 ERAs. Two more gold parallels of the ri...

About a year ago or more, I learned of the collecting term "trifecta." I don't know who came up with that, but I first read about it at Drew's Cards . I thought it was a great little collecting category. The best part of tracking down a rookie card, auto card and relic card of a single player is it's a little bit of a challenge. Going through my collection, I found lots of examples of completing two of the three categories. But coming up with all three was more difficult. Finding a rookie card and relic card of Manny Ramirez was easy. Finding an autograph card, not so easy. Same with Shawn Green. Finding a rookie card and an auto card of Sandy Koufax was doable. But I don't know if I've ever seen a relic card of Koufax. Finding an auto card and relic card of Duke Snider was achievable. But it takes big cash to land the rookie card. In the end, I found 15 Dodgers for which I have the rookie card, autograph card and a relic card. That's much m...