Night Owl Cards

  When I was in college, I worked the hamburger grill at one of the on-campus restaurants my first semester or two.   The cooking area was connected to the nearby cafeteria and one of the cooks who worked next to me was named Cliff. He was probably in his 50s or 60s, a cheerful Black man who enjoyed working around young college students and had a smile for everyone, even a couple of notoriously grumpy people who worked there with him.  Cliff loved to play the lottery and everyone knew that. He would always respond to jokes about him throwing money away every week by saying, "You've got to be in it to win it!" I'm sure that wasn't the first time I heard that phrase, but it really stuck with me with Cliff uttering it so often. And it's what I think of now every baseball trade deadline or offseason. You've got to be in it to win it. Once I used to rag on the Yankees, like a lot of people did, because they "bought their championships." But that was a...

The next-door neighbor is having a new addition built onto the back of her house. You know what that means: just because the workers get up with the cows, everyone else is getting up early, too. So with the sound of hammers and saws in my head, I showered and dressed and headed out to do some early shopping. My birthday was two days ago, so I was armed with gift cards and ready to do some damage. Unfortunately, one of those gift cards was for Target. The Target card aisle the last month or more has been depressing. You'd have to pay me to buy the cards offered there now and that's saying something, particularly in the middle of baseball season. But I stopped there again and left less than 3 minutes later empty-handed. I decided to give Walmart a try even though it has been just as barren lately. Then, as I was about to leave that card aisle also with nothing, I spotted hanging in the back of the shelf some 2017 Stadium Club rack packs. I seized one of them both eag...

These are the things we do during the offseason while waiting for the new cards to come out. I've got a new series on the blog. I don't know how long it will last or how often it will occur. It might be a one-and-done deal. But it's interesting to me right now, and that's all that matters. Right? Right. My favorite album of the past year, by any large unit of measurement you prefer to use, is "El Camino," by the Black Keys. Phenomenal stuff. Every song kills. And like an idiot, I've downloaded half the album song by song, instead of buying the whole thing, which would have been much more efficient. But this blog is about baseball cards, of course. So, in order to match baseball cards up with my love of this album, and of music in general, I decided to see if I could find a card to match the song title of each song on the album. It's a nice, mindless exercise in nonsense, perfect for the offseason and perfect (*throat clearing noise*) for whe...