Night Owl Cards

Christmas Eve greetings, all. When someone decides to blog about sports, they first must promise that they will write a post about their all-time team. It can be the "all-time best" at each position, even if that's rather pedestrian. Or it can be something less obvious. I prefer the latter. And I've already composed the All-Greg team , the All-Fish team and the All-Beer team . But it's Christmastime and any team on this festive day should be Christmas-related. So, how do you combine baseball with Christmas? They don't go together very well. Opposite seasons, you know. What to do. What to do. I thought about finding players' last names that evoke Christmas images. You know, Rob Deer and J.T. Snow and Jon Garland and Tim Mistletoe (he's a prospect you've never heard of). But that's probably been done before, possibly multiple times over the years. As I thought about it some more, I started to hear bells in the distance. Sleigh b...

As a collector, my thoughts on this day go directly to Topps' old Father & Son subset, first issued in a five-card series in 1976 Topps. The Father & Son set continued Topps' habit of displaying its old cards on a current set (Topps did it in 1975 with its MVP subset and in 1974 with its tribute to Hank Aaron). It is a nice contrast, the old card of the father paired with the current photo of the son. The card back is very nice, too (excluding the misspelling of "influence"). The current players "write" about what kind of effect their major league-playing father had on their career. I often wondered how Topps received these "letters" from the players. Did they interview the players or actually ask them to write something down? I have a feeling they weren't interviewed, or at least Topps didn't use the words from the interview verbatim. I'll show why later. Almost 10 years later, Topps tried the Father ...

One of the great things about cards during the 1970s is that for several years Topps would feature the full names of players on the card backs. First name. Middle name. Last name. The whole shootin ' match. I became fascinated with players' middle names. There were some dandies. Maybe it's not as big of a deal now, with the wide variety of first names you see. In sportswriting , we're forever struggling with the growing number of unique names attached to high school athletes. (My two cents: parents, the name doesn't make your child unique. Your child makes your child unique). But back when everyone was named Jim, Joe, Mike and John, middle names gave parents a creative outlet. And with baseball players, boy were they ever creative. I'm going to feature a team of my favorite middle names, all from the 1975 Topps set. Why '75 only? Well, time is short and I had to focus on one year, and why not do it for my favorite set of all time? Here is the starting li...