Night Owl Cards

I was watching some of ESPN's Sunday Night baseball game between the Indians and Phillies the other day. As often is the case when the Indians' Carlos Santana pops up on the screen and I view his statistics, I quietly lament the Dodgers trading him away back in 2008. Then, sometime during Alex Rodriguez's pointless ramblings and awkward bantering, I started to fantasize about Santana's contributions for the Dodgers if he had stayed with the team. Perhaps he would have solidified the catching position back in 2011-13 or maybe helped out at first base. This "what could have been" thought process often happens during my fan reflections and I have a feeling it's a common part of being a fan. We always want the best for our team and we just hate it when a talented player gets away. The Dodgers have their fair share of "big fish" stories, some of the biggest, and I thought it would be interesting to put together a "One That Got Away...

For most of my life, the word "Santana" has been synonymous with one of my favorite bands of all-time. Although I was still toddling around during Woodstock, Santana's music is timeless and universal and has been the soundtrack to many moments in my life. But then I came across "Santana" in the world of baseball and things were never the same. It was just one guy for a little while. But then there was another, and another, and now, in the last two years, there are a record number of Santanas playing major league baseball. But I'm getting ahead of myself. Let's start at the beginning. Because that is the way " Spawn " is played. We find the one player who started it all -- who had a name that no other player in the majors had featured before, and then find all the players who came after him, who have that same name. "Santana" was not a major league name until 1983, two years after the band Santana released the platinum-se...

Slightly more than a year ago, we were coming to grips with an odd little Topps offering called "Lineage." It featured a rather boring base set with the most pointless card backs since Upper Deck dared put out a baseball product. But the inserts were nostalgic and fun and basically the whole excuse for the set. I was caught up in Lineage Fever last summer and decided to pursue just one of the insert sets -- the tribute to my first year of collecting -- the Lineage '75 minis set. The set is 200 cards large and I thought it was ridiculous of me to chase an insert set that large. It was something I had never done in all my years of collecting. Well since that time, Topps has moved on, and everyone else has moved on. Lineage has basically become Archives, a set that left me cold. But I stayed firmly entrenched, pursuing those tiny, colorful Lineage parallels to the bitter end. Slightly less than a year after I announced my wild-and-crazy quest , I am very close to ...

My former favorite player is now a member of the team which shall not be named . But just as painfully, someone else has taken over Russell Martin's talent for making the best baseball cards of any current ballplayer. It's someone who used to be a part of the Dodgers organization. Someone with a great degree of hope and promise. This is the guy who has taken your crown, Russell: Yes, it's the former L.A. catching prospect who was traded for an aging Casey Blake in order to make room for a 15-year career in Dodger blue for Russell Martin. Urp. And we all know what the Dodgers' catching situation is now. I think Carlos says it best: That Carlos. He does it all. Adios, Russ.