Night Owl Cards

Mention "1973" to someone who lived through it and a number images may come to mind: Watergate, gas lines, the Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia. I was a kid in '73, as blissfully unaware as I could be, watching cartoons and Sesame Street and eating Spaghetti-O's. I missed out on the '73 "angst," and instead remember it as that time immediately before I became aware that the wonderful game of baseball was also played by men on television and you could collect picture cards of them. I am now aware of just about everything '70s when it comes to cards. And the 1973 Topps set is a special look into the decade that is as unvarnished as anything issued back then. There is no wild design to divert from the photo. We get a front-row seat into exactly what was going on in baseball that year. And every element is delightfully obvious. I recently received a handful of '73 cards for my set from Mark, who is on Twitter. They arrived in exchange for a...

Happy Carlos May Day! I wanted to find this cartoon to acknowledge the always fun trivia question, "who wore his birthdate on his uniform?," but didn't have time to search all of my cards to find it. Tigers fan Don came to the rescue on Twitter and told me it was on the back of the 1977 Topps Al Bumbry card. Mystery solved. But it made me think that I would really like to catalog my cards by cartoon. Really. There are so many cool facts that I learned from reading cartoons on card backs during the '70s that I often want to find the fact but can't find the card. So, I might do that some day -- you know, when I have so much time on my hands that I'm spending the whole day rocking on the back porch. But today I have no time, so you're getting a bunch of random thoughts that I've had over the last few days just thrown together like so, because I can't form a properly structured post. Try to enjoy. When I scanned the Matt Kemp Bowman...

"Two dozen what?" you're asking. Ah, sit tight for the story, dear readers. While I was at work last night, my wife went out shopping. During her search for party favors for my daughter's long-delayed birthday party/sleepover, she stopped at that dollar store with the dollar bags of '80s baseball cards. And because she is an angel, she grabbed a bag for me and left it by the computer when I came home from work. Now my wife knows very little about baseball, but she knows I like these particular bags, and she understands a bargain when she sees one. Forty or fifty cards for a dollar? What's not to understand? She actually did quite well with the first card, which was showing on the top of the stack. It was a 1986 Topps Rod Carew card. My wife doesn't know who Rod Carew is or that I have this card already. But really, for blindly grabbing at the first card you see, you can't do better than Rod Carew. Sadly, after Carew, the bag went south. Way, way, way ...

All the talk this week about "The Big Lebowski" and the creation of virtual cards of missing toes, etc., made me think about a certain childhood obsession of mine concerning former player Carlos May. White Sox fans will remember May as a promising outfielder who had some decent seasons for Chicago back in the early-to-mid '70s. They also probably remember what happened to May's right thumb early in his career. May was on duty for the Marine reserves in the summer of 1969 when a mortar unit that he was cleaning misfired and blew off part of his right thumb. The accident could have killed his career, but after several operations, he was back playing for the White Sox the next season. Years later, when I was a kid, I heard about May's accident and I started searching his baseball cards to see if I could spot his right thumb (I was a weird kid). May was playing in Japan at the time, so it wasn't like I could watch him on TV. Cards were all I had to go on. But I c...