Night Owl Cards

Slowly, ever so slowly, I am becoming a smarter card consumer. Although I would never look down on anyone who buys cards from the card aisle or tries to complete sets that way, I am attempting more and more not to do that. Random pack purchases are down and, as you know, attempting to complete a current set is WAY down. But Topps still finds a way to get me, even when I'm being good. You might remember a couple of months ago when I bought a blaster of 2012 Allen and Ginter from my friendly neighborhood Walmart just because I assumed something sitting on a shelf for almost two years couldn't possibly be full price. It didn't end well . Well, this time I was at Walmart again in desperation mode thanks to another Hallmark holiday. There in the card aisle, I discovered marked down blasters. And one of them was not 2012 A&G but 2013 A&G! Weeeeee! Now this was smart shopping. Only $11.99 and I still needed 34 cards to complete the set. Granted, most of them a...

I'm a big believer in lists. Christmas lists. Birthday lists. Earth Day lists. Sadie Hawkins Day lists. You wanna get what you want? Make a list. Finding a blog without a want list is similar to coming across certain people around the holidays (not naming any names) who say things like, "you know what I like," or "it's not a surprise if I have to tell you." OK, fine. Then that anvil I bought you last September must have been a smashing success. I got the "surprise" part down cold. Make a list! Lists may not be romantic or spontaneous, but they are effective as hell. And with the way most people's lives are these days -- including mine -- they are absolutely necessary. I don't know 'bout you but I don't have time to interpret smoke signals. The benefits of lists have been displayed on this blog probably hundreds of times now. I have a rather extensive group of want lists. They're not complete and they're not thor...

I don't have a lot of special Washington Nationals cards. Just a handful. But when I pull one, I notice it more than when I'm pulling one of another team, because I immediately think, "Geez, I'm stuck with this thing." With most teams, I can find a team collector and flip it for a Dodger. But not with the Nationals. I don't have a Nationals card connection anymore. So the Nationals cards simply accumulate like a backed-up sink. Indeed, it does get a little messy because if anyone were to stumble across my card collection, they might say, "what, are you a Nationals fan or something?" It's embarrassing. But if simply owning a semi-decent assortment of parallels of a particular team was a reason to be a fan, I would have become a diehard Oakland A's follower a long time ago. No, there's more than that to my gradual admiration for the Nationals. One is that their Triple A team is closer to where I live than any other te...

Like many guys, I refuse to grow up. I put on a good front, but really, I'm about 14 years old. There are just some things that never change no matter how old you get. Baseball is always fun to watch. Girls are always fun to watch. Bugs are always fun to watch. Pretty much in that order. And because of my profession, the worst day of the entire year is always in September and the best day of the year is always in June. For 40-something years, I have rooted for the last day of school. A lot of people have long since given up that wonderful feeling of childish anticipation. Those poor, poor people. June is just another month to them. But like I did as a kid, counting down the seconds on the last day of school, I still count down the hours until the high school sports season is no more. That last day this year was Saturday. And one of my co-workers said, "we should have a party." And so we did. It didn't last long. September-to-June was a long slog. But we wer...

Firstly, I'd like to direct your attention to this post . I'll wait ... Toot! That's me tooting my own horn for one of the few times I've predicted correctly. Usually, my prognosticating, in a word, sucks. But I stand by my prediction: Rays in 5. I'm not half the visionary as the 11-year-old I saw at the card show Sunday afternoon. He and his dad were going from table to table buying every David Price card they could find. He had a bunch. They're probably all on eBay right now. Anyway, this is the time of the year, as it has been the last 20 years, when I pick out all the ex-Dodgers participating in the World Series. Some years there are none. Some there are a bunch. We have a fairly sizable crop this year. Let's start with Don Zimmer (above), the Rays' "senior baseball advisor." I don't know what a senior baseball advisor does. But on Sunday, his job was throwing out the first pitch. Zimmer, of course, was most known during his Dodger car...