Night Owl Cards

  The last couple of days, I've been gathering envelopes from my latest card order from a few different online sites. Since they're coming from several different people, a host of unfamiliar return addresses show up in the mailbox, and I just assume they're coming from ebay or sportlots. Then I opened one envelope and the above Christmas greeting came out. You'll notice the salutations are in French. It says "best wishes." It's not an owl, but a penguin is close enough when he's carting a sleigh of goodies. The return address was in French, too, from Quebec. When I opened the card, a baseball card was attached inside. This is that card: Now, if you read the post that I wrote on obtaining a bunch of cheap-o 1980s Fleer cards from the baseballcardstore site, you know that I said that I had accumulated all of the '89 Fleer cards that I needed for the set from that site except for one: the Craig Biggio rookie card. I assumed the Biggio rookie, even t...

I'll be writing my usual year-end spectacular in a couple of weeks, and that always includes a reference to the best cards of the year. But I don't feel like I'm undermining that post by participating in a contest by the newly named (damn, I've got to look this up, my Latin sucks) Eamus Catuli! blog. It's a cool contest idea: write about your favorite 2016 card acquisition. This is a little difficult for me since 2016 has not jumped out as a particularly interesting year for cardboard. My team didn't win the World Series this year, so I have no warm fuzzies about that. There was nothing issued that made me lunge at the keyboard so I could order it (I'm not much of a "I need that card for my PC" collector anyway). Just about every enjoyable card that I've acquired in the past year was NOT issued in 2016. So, what's my favorite 2016 card? You just saw it. Yeah, that's it. The Craig Biggio card right there. That's my favo...

Today is the one day out of the year that I feel like a hen in the fox house. No, I do not have a vote in the Baseball Hall of Fame balloting. But, yes, I am a sportswriter and editor, and I don't enjoy seeing my profession bashed as often as it is on this day. I don't enjoy listening to critics accuse writers of being elitist and sanctimonious and passing judgment, while they also judge. Last night on Twitter, someone who supposedly knows a lot insinuated that people who choose to write for newspapers for a living are stupid. And I thought, "How come there's never relentless insults of plumbers or accountants or hotel maids in my timeline? How come it's always sportswriters?" The fact is, the arguments that arise from the Hall of Fame vote are too divisive and too personal. It's so over-the-top. All of the critics' efforts, biases and prejudices are being invested into a museum in a southeast corner of New York state. That's all it is. It...

This isn't so much a post about Craig Biggio as a post about the almost daily process a sportswriter goes through in tracking down the person he/she needs to interview. If you're a regular beat writer for the team, it's a fairly routine process. You get to know what the players look like and where they will be at certain times. But if you're going into a situation cold -- and there are many too many of those instances as a writer -- it's very awkward. Biggio was the first major league player at a major league game that I ever interviewed. He is probably going into the Hall of Fame, which would make him the other Hall of Famer I've interviewed (I posted on Phil Niekro earlier). With credentials like that, you'd think he would be easy to track down. Unfortunately, this was very early in Biggio's career, his second year as a starter. Also, I never saw the Astros living in the Northeast, unless they were in the playoffs. So it took a long time to recog...