Night Owl Cards

  Starting a Blog Bat-Around these days is kind of like announcing in 1989 that you just bought a vinyl record. Nobody cares, everyone's moved on to compact discs/TikTok.   But records came back, and are dumb expensive, so maybe blogging will, too. Anyway, this is a Blog Bat-Around for the seven of you that blog and care about this topic.   Not Another Baseball Card Blog has already kicked it off . This theme came from a Bluesky discussion and was specifically mentioned by Shlabotnik Report , I think. What are cards you like that feature a team you don't like?   This could get very involved for me. There are a lot of cards I like, often showing teams I root against. And my dislike for teams can spread like a disease covering two-thirds of major league franchises. It all depends on the baseball scene at the time, whether playoffs are involved, etc.   But to keep this manageable, I'll cover four or five teams. And most of the cards I'm showing are coming from ch...

  OK, back by popular demand, here is a look at my collection based on who is in the Division Series (what used to be the lowliest of the playoff series, but now we have a bunch of wild-card hoo hah and fandoodle).   There are four new teams to consider. Of course, there are four holdover teams that I've already considered, so for those four repeats, I'm going to select my second "oldest" and "newest" card for that team. The random is still random.   All right, I have the Dusty Baker card above that represents three teams in this postseason. Let's do this:   ORIOLES VS. RANGERS   Baltimore Orioles (cards in my collection: 2,574. Overall rank: 14th)   Oldest card in my collection: 1956 Topps Chuck Diering (I decided to leave a lot of these uncropped, because I like the effect ... or did at the time).     Newest card in collection: 2023 Topps Heritage New Age Performers Gunnar Henderson.  Random card in my collection: 1988 Topps Jim Dwyer Thou...

  For several years on this blog, I wrote an annual "if I was king of the postseason" post to kick off the baseball playoffs. It was fun -- just me riffing on who my favorites and least favorites were for that particular year -- but it was a lot of work. Then it started getting repetitive/monotonous and also a couple people got their undies in a bunch about what I wrote. I don't need to be dedicating a lot of time to something just to get a bunch of grief out of it, so I stopped. I don't miss it. But I do miss writing about the postseason a little. I thought it'd be fun to take a look at each of the wild card matchups in a lighthearted fashion -- no overt rooting here -- with the help of TCDB and my collection. I'm going to take a look at the oldest and newest cards in my collection for each team, plus a random card selected by the TCDB randomizer. There are some interesting connections between these teams. Here we go: RANGERS VS. RAYS Texas Rangers (cards in ...