Night Owl Cards

 (*sigh* Looked like a catch to me. Time for Cardboard Appreciation. This is the 362nd in a series:)    I picked up this card at the monthly show yesterday (more on that tomorrow). It's the first time I've come across this insert, though it's possible someone showed it off on a blog post 12 years ago or something.   It's a pretty cool medium-thick card. The boxscore is recessed into the card and it's a glorious moment-in-time item, which are some of the best kinds of cards. This one commemorates Carlos Delgado's four-home run game.   Surprisingly, this card is from the 2004 Upper Deck Play Ball set, which I've long disdained for the "melted faces" paintings of the base cards. That's all I've previously seen from the set -- the only cards in my collection are base Dodgers. It goes to show you how sets are always stashing the good cards in the inserts and collectors consequently hoard those cards.   This card was a dollar purchase and I quick...

I recently came across something that I thought I had thrown out a long time ago. It was a folder filled with reference type material from my first season of covering a professional baseball team, the now-defunct Niagara Falls Rapids. I've mentioned the team a time or  two . Like me, they were in their first season, too, in 1989. They played in the short-season Class A New York-Penn League. Throughout that year, we figured things out together. A lot has changed since 1989. Not only do the Rapids not exist, but many of the teams that were in the NY-P at the time do not exist. Also, entire careers have come and gone since that season and that's what I want to address. In the folder were rosters from almost all of the NY-P teams in the league at the time. It was interesting to look back at those rosters and see which players had made it to the majors. Apparently, I had done it once before, because there were marks next to the names of the players who were big-leaguers. ...