Night Owl Cards

  For the second straight year, and the fourth time in five years, the Dodgers have reached the League Championship Series.   Many fans -- I have been made very aware -- don't like this. But that comes with the territory when as a fan you're part of an exclusive club for more than one or two years in a row. The Dodgers are the villain.   I know that relatively few on social media will be rooting for the Dodgers. (A lot are rooting for a World Series between the Mariners-Brewers, who are practically the same team). I have tried to add known Dodgers fans to my following list in hopes of balancing out the anti-Dodger content, but the best-case scenario is to avoid social media as much as possible. We'll see how that goes. Social media is great for getting immediate info on plays during the course of a game, nothing else compares.   A lot of the people who comment on this blog aren't part of social media sites, so I'll move on to the card part of the post.   The two...

The 2009 O-Pee-Chee set is filled with spectacular cards such as this. Marvel for days over the heavyset cameraman, or the Minute Maid Park logo (mmmmm, oranges!), or whether that's Cecil Cooper crouched in the dugout. But the most obvious feature of this card is current Brewers manager Craig Counsell's batting stance. How in the world did he hit anything like that? The immediate answer is the snarky one: obviously, he didn't. He batted .226 in 2008. It says so right there on the back of his baseball card. But it's interesting to me how many changes a player must go through to stay in the major leagues. Batters, especially those who aren't naturals at the plate, are forever fiddling with their stances, maybe not to such a severe degree as Counsell, but you have to adapt to survive. It makes me think of my own batting stance when I was a youngster. My stance was the same -- it never changed, except only when I was imitating the stances of famous baseball...