Night Owl Cards

    I haven't had much money to spend on cards the last three or four months. In fact, there's a card show this weekend and I ain't going. It's quite the contrast to earlier in the year when I was throwing money at 1956 Topps all-stars. But there are a couple new bills to pay and if I'm going to unearth some cash on cards it's certainly not going to be the new stuff. A few weeks ago I started to feel like I should live up to my name as a collector and see what the baseballcardstore had in stock. Even someone on a strict budget can afford to throw a few dimes at some cards. I was surprised to find that the dimebox store has become a nickelbox store. In order to compensate for the crazy shipping costs, the site's owners have moved to tiered shipping prices, and although those are higher than what was once on the site, they've knocked back the price on their cards to a NICKEL. By the time I added up the cards I bought and the new shipping price, it was no ...

In high school, and then later when I moved away for college, the library was a place of transition, somewhere to go while I adjusted to my new surroundings. I didn't build relationships easily then -- never have, in fact -- and it took time. By the end of high school, and the end of college, I had formed relationships that have lasted a lifetime. But the early years were a little tough, and I'm glad the library was there. During my freshman and sophomore years in high school, if I had a free period, I'd head to the library, even if there was no homework to do. I'd walk to the back, the small "lounge area" where the magazine racks were, and pull out a Sports Illustrated or Time or Life (yes, Life, that's how old I am). Then I'd proceed to spend the next 45 minutes or so absorbing the contents. A lot of times, it was the happiest part of my day. In college, out of habit, I'd do the same thing. The library was much larger and filled with fas...

Green grass is an oasis in a big city. I'm sure I'm not the first person to say that. It's no wonder that urban dwellers gravitate toward parks and baseball fields with all the depressing concrete surrounding them. Over the years, with the rise of new and newer ballparks, we've become accustomed to our cities' well-manicured, gloriously green ballfields created by well-schooled groundskeepers. Fancy shapes mowed into the turf don't even faze us anymore. In fact, I'm quite sure some of those ritzy people in the enclosed skyboxes demand it. We are so used to green grass and so thrilled by it that we forget how it once was: I've shown this card before . The photo apparently was taken during the famous Grass Blight that hit the southeast in 1971. The Expos cards in the 1972 set are filled with pictures of long-neglected lawns. Brown grass and patchy spots everywhere. It's terribly shocking to modern fans who demand nothing less than im...

This is one of my favorite Expos cards. It's not because there is a Dodger in the background or because I have farmers in my background. It's because Farmer is wearing a red Expos jersey in game action. The red Expos jersey was fantastic, but about the only time you saw it on baseball cards was on a posed shot, during batting practice, with the player grinning goofy-like. There aren't a lot of action photos of Expos in red jerseys -- or at least I don't have many in my collection. Some time ago, either on my blog or another blog -- I don't know, I read so many -- I could have sworn that someone left a comment that said something like, "I don't remember those red Expos jerseys!!!!!!!" And my instant reaction was, "you are so young, son." I filed the comment away, and when post ideas were low, I decided to fish out some other Expos red jerseys photos. But I had to stop, because it just got out of hand. Every Star Expo ...