Night Owl Cards

 (Woof, blog views have taken another downturn, basically in the last two weeks. Maybe everyone was too busy watching the Olympics! Anyway, for those still reading, this is called Cardboard Appreciation and we're at the 365th in a series):   As far as I can tell, this is the first time Shoeless Joe Jackson has appeared on a Topps card.   I pulled it when I went back for a hanger box of 2026 Topps last week. I opened it at work. When I saw the card I didn't think anything of it other than "that's a weird-looking thing."   But later I remembered how MLB removed Shoeless Joe and other deceased ballplayers from its permanently ineligible list last spring, making them available to be voted into the Hall of Fame. Also, since Topps doesn't make a move without MLB approval, that means Jackson (and I assume Pete Rose) are eligible to appear in current baseball cards.   Up until now my Shoeless Joe cards have been created by Upper Deck, Donruss/Playoff/Panini/Leaf, vari...

  For the first time in two decades I have a new favorite player.   Admittedly, it seems silly to still be selecting favorite players at my age. I've long passed the period where someone currently playing on the field is older than me. Just about everyone playing these days are "babies" to me, and I know that I have almost nothing in common with many of them.   But then somebody like Shohei Ohtani does something like this , and I'm a wide-eyed youngster again.    So, yeah, Shohei Ohtani is my new favorite player.   He surpasses the retiring Clayton Kershaw, who had been my favorite player for longer than any other Dodger in the life of my fandom. Here is the rundown, which I last listed -- holy smokes -- 15 years ago .   1975-83: Ron Cey 1983-85: Pedro Guerrero 1985-94: Orel Hershiser 1995-99: Raul Mondesi 2000-04: Shawn Green 2005-07: Brad Penny 2007-08: Russell Martin 2009-25: Clayton Kershaw 2025-?: Shohei Ohtani   Usually I don't select a new ...

   There's a certain amount of isolation built into being a blogger, or a writer in general. I don't know if that's exactly the right word but I definitely have the feeling of being on my own island from time to time, and probably more often lately.   There's no easy way to gauge who is reading your copy or how often. Blogger (and I'm assuming Wordpress) is imperfect like that. All you have are comments -- and Blogger has now made that more difficult by requiring you to use the Google Chrome browser to comment on its blogs (but I make sure to go that extra step to comment on other blogs). And also you have reader numbers, and wow is that inaccurate, especially lately.   Have any other bloggers experienced this?:      These are the viewer numbers for my posts on NOC for the last week or so. Numbers are on the far right. They are wildly beyond what is typical. The same holds true for my 1993 Upper Deck blog, where posts the last couple of cards is in tri...

  It's the summer traveling season. We're visiting or greeting visitors, yet the cards keep coming. It's sometimes difficult to focus. What do I write about -- this or this ?   But I've finally settled on a couple of player collections, a rare off-shoot of my main collecting goals. I think they're impressive in their own way.   I just added the Topps Now card for Clayton Kershaw's 3,000th strikeout. I just had to get the card and didn't pay all that much for it. These cards are almost nothing to look at, I don't like them any more than I did when Topps Now first became a thing. Just think if Topps created an interesting design for these, it might have all my money.   But that's just the lead-in card for this post. One of my player collecting projects is to get all of Kershaw's flagship gold cards. I wrote about finishing the run through 2022 a couple of years ago. And I finally decided to get back on that project. So recently, three more cards ha...

  I have been snapping pictures of the cards that Johnny's Trading Spot sent me a week or so ago just about all afternoon without suitable results.   I'm not sure what's going on but none of the pictures look right. Some of this may be because it's summer and there is so much light streaming into the house, but also I think it's because I never want to deal with whatever I need to get "the perfect picture." I really miss my scanner during times like these. But I can't be bothered to figure out why the heck it won't work or get yet another new one.   So I guess that's my problem, huh, if I don't want to do what it takes?   (And yours, I guess, since I'm going to show less than satisfactory pictures right now).   Johnny has been clearing house again in that alphabetical way he has. Lucky me, he's now at the K's, which means a whole bunch of Clayton Kershaw cards came my way. Sure, I have a lot of Kershaw cards already but he was ...

  Clayton Kershaw should reach 3.000 strikeouts tonight in the Dodgers' game against the White Sox. That's provided that he lasts more than two or three innings, but he's been doing pretty well since his return off the injured list, so chances are good.   Kershaw will become the first Dodgers pitcher -- who is known as a Dodger pitcher -- to achieve the milestone while a Dodger. There have been other pitchers who either started with the Dodgers and reached the milestone with another team or pitched briefly with the Dodgers and reached the milestone but are not commonly associated with the team.   Don Sutton, Pedro Martinez and Greg Maddux all pitched for the Dodgers but struck out their 3,000th batter with someone else.    In one case, a pitcher hit the 3,000 milestone while with the Dodgers, but is more well-known as a National or a Tiger or a Diamondback or even a Met.     In fact, Max Scherzer is the most recent pitcher to reach 3,000 strikeouts. It...

  Yesterday I attended the big show at the state fairgrounds that goes off twice a year. The last time I was there was in September and I obtained the majority of cards from three dealers who are almost always there and almost always get the majority of my business.   I was so confident that they would be there this time that I didn't bother to update my blog want lists or to finally figure out how to access my TCDB want lists on my phone. I just took my hand-penned want list for 1969 Topps and 1979 Topps football and stuffed them in my pocket. If two of those dealers were there, then that would be sufficient.   Well, neither of the two were there. This was a crisis because they are there so often I automatically thought something was wrong. Then I realized just about all my vintage options were gone. The crumpled list in my pocket was useless.   It was time to regroup, though after I did, I walked the show with a lot more uneasiness than I usually do. Not only were...