Night Owl Cards

    A Pirates account on Bluesky recently featured the Pirates player for which he had the most cards and then put out the question (I'm paraphrasing), "which Pirates player has the most cards in your collection?"   My favorite team isn't the Pirates, so I could only guess. My first thought was Dave Parker, but I knew that wasn't right because he also appeared with the Reds on many junk wax sets that at least equaled the number of Pirates cards I owned of Parker.   This got me curious about the player with the most cards for every MLB team in my collection. So I went to TCDB to crunch the numbers -- which took a few days because TCDB has been crashing like mad lately.   It turns out I was correct about Parker. He's not my collection's most frequent Pirate. But I was in the right era. My most for each team is the product of several factors: the era when I started collecting ('70s), my favorite cards (also the '70s and early '80s), the overproduc...

    Back in January, when we knew the five former players who were going to be inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame for 2025, I wrote a post on those five players, mentioning how many cards I had of each of them.   I went back to that post to see if I had gained any cards of Dick Allen, Dave Parker, CC Sabathia, Ichiro Suzuki or Bobby  Billy Wagner since.   I did. None for Sabathia or Wagner, but one each for Allen and Suzuki and five for Dave Parker. That makes sense, since Parker is from my era and I always want his cards. But I was surprised I had gathered a whole five and I didn't know which ones those were (the one above is one of them though). The key thing to know is it gave me more than 100 Parker cards as in January the total stood at 99.   Dave Parker's induction was the one I was looking forward to most. Unfortunately, he passed away last month and now the induction ceremony is a lot less interesting to me as both Parker and Allen are gone. ...

  I keep forgetting to acknowledge TCDB and their members for voting my blog as "Favorite Blog" again this year. This makes it five years in a row and six out of the past seven. "Favorite blog" seems like an outdated award even to me -- sounds something like "favorite cassette tape" -- but it shows that people are still reading and still enjoying and it's nice to have that reminder. Or maybe it's like the Gold Glove award and people vote purely on reputation.   There is the medal table, except I get a crown. Now on to the honor that more people care about -- and they really do care about it. The Baseball Hall of Fame announced the baseball writers' selections for this year's Hall of Fame class. Three players are going in -- Ichiro, CC Sabathia and Billy Wagner -- joining the earlier committee picks of Dave Parker and Dick Allen. This means I need to update the Most Hall of Famers tally, which I'll get to when the 2025 class is inducted....