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...

  Probably the final card purchase of 2024 has arrived and it's a really, really good one, something I've wanted for a long time.   Ever since I was a youngster I have been fascinated by the SSPC sets from the 1970s, those cards that were nothing but photos during a time when that was unusual in the hobby. I first came to know them through the 1978 Yankees yearbook, something so pervasive in my neighborhood that I eventually bought my own copy from the local CVS because it seemed like everyone had one. I was a card-carrying Yankee hater even back then but I knew the yearbook contained the SSPC Yankees as a panel insert. I didn't know these cards as "SSPC" or that they were part of a larger set, as panels for other teams were also inserted into publications. I just knew them as cards I didn't have and therefore needed, even if they were Yankees. Since that time I became aware that it's a 270-card set and there are cards for other teams -- most notably the D...

  A year ago, Topps released, seemingly out of the blue, a product called "2021 Topps Chrome Platinum Anniversary". That's right, it was 2022 and it was dated 2021.  I was prepared to ignore/spit on this product for obvious reasons -- the 1952 Topps design again , there's no saving Topps, is there? -- but, strangely, I found the cards pretty damn cool.   Now, me going "over the moon" for a current product is relative. I don't sink my teeth into a new set fully unless I really, really like it, and that happens very seldom. I am not buying box after box after box, which is what you'd think was a collector going "over the moon." But I did gush over these cards on the blog and I did buy one of those mega boxes of the product (albeit a gift card purchase) and I do welcome any cards from the set people want to throw at me. So that's "over the moon" for me.   A year later I have maybe 70 cards from this set (out of 700). No real less...

  I don't know why I get so obsessed with time appropriateness when it comes to baseball cards. I guess I do it with music, too. I can't stand it when Alexa or some other programmed entity responds to orders to play '70s music and then six songs in you hear "Jessie's Girl".   I've pointed it out in passing on several blog posts and it's been the subject of a few others. Usually it's related to retro sets. Upper Deck was a big violator when it was putting out baseball cards. One of my favorite UD sets is the UD Decade '70s set from 2001, but it contains a bunch of time-inappropriate photos.   That is 1960s Tom Seaver, not 1970s Seaver.   But Topps isn't immune either and again it shows up in one of my favorite retro sets, All-Time Fan Favorites. Just one example:   Rollie Fingers was not in full mustachio mode at this point when the 1973 design made its appearance.   These missed connections continue to this day and I came across another one...

  This is a team fanboy post so please excuse me for all the Dodger blue. Julio Urias is getting the Opening Day start for the Dodgers tonight against Arizona. He is the 63rd pitcher in franchise history to start Opening Day. I know this because I counted.   I got curious, so I went through retrosheet.org and figured out all of the Game 1 starters for the Dodgers since they began as the "Bridegrooms" in 1890.   Here is briefly what I found: Clayton Kershaw holds the franchise record for the most Opening Day starts with nine. He set the record with his eighth season-debut start in 2018.   Kershaw broke the record previously held by Don Drysdale and Don Sutton, who each started Opening Day seven times in their careers. Kershaw also broke Sutton's record of seven straight seasons of Opening Day starts with his eighth straight start in 2018.   After the top three, Fernando Valenzuela has the most Opening Day starts with six, along with Brickyard Kennedy, who also ha...

  My daughter had her delayed college graduation ceremony this weekend. She graduated in December and the diploma has been in hand for five months, and she's been working a full-time job in her field for just as long. But it was nice to go through the literal pomp-and-circumstance Friday even if there was still the social distancing and streaming and all those other thing that accompany crowds these days. It was nice to see her in the cap-and-gown, with her friends who also graduated, and to go to dinner, and to take an ungodly amount of pictures, all that stuff you do as parents of graduates. Since she has her own life now and there were things to do with The Boyfriend, etc., my wife and I had some time on our own in the ol' college town. We're pretty familiar with it now and even though the town was packed and traffic was a hassle, we went to our favorite places to snoop around. One of them is a two-story antique shop in a walk-through market, just down the road from the ...