Night Owl Cards

  I'm not sure how coherent this post will be. I'm writing it while also trying to write a story for work on my day off, while on virtually no sleep, while being informed my car is dead for good, while it's 86 degrees inside . But I must show off the greatest miscut card I've ever seen in person before life finally finishes me off.   Here: This is a Dodgers card, no? This piece of cultural significance arrived from Corey, that well-known Tim Wallach collecto r . I don't know where he found it. It is such a perfect miscut card in every way -- notable '70s cult figure, Dodgers team name firmly intact, Mr. Gamble's photo entirely intact. You know this is going in my Dodgers binders, right? It's proof that Gamble played for the Dodgers. The back harbors goodness as well. You get all of Gamble's statistical history along with the beginnings of a second cartoon at the bottom. That's the comic for the Dodger who shares the card with Gamble. And I'd ...

In the quest to own every Dodgers card ever made, you make a lot of compromises with what you know as "a baseball card." In general, a baseball card for me is a photograph of a major league player, background included, arranged inside a colorful design. But there are all kinds of definitions to baseball cards these days. Bowman Draft, for an example, is a weird spin-off of what I know as a "baseball card." It does not contain major league players, for the most part, and in most cases it's filled with cards of players I don't know at all. It's also rife with Topps' version of alternate reality. Players often are photoshopped into uniforms they haven't worn and shown in front of generic backgrounds. Take a look at this Connor Wong card, for example (and no, I didn't know who Connor Wong was until this moment. But thanks to 30 seconds of research I now know that Austin Barnes is the nephew of  Mike Gallego). There doesn't seem to be...