Night Owl Cards

It's a melancholy kind of day around here. It's rained all day, work is a beast, the Dodgers' win that I recorded yesterday was sabotaged by ESPN's constant switching of games between its networks, and I woke up too early this morning only to catch the news the Pedro Guerrero had suffered a second massive stroke and is currently in a coma. Guerrero was my favorite during the second half of high school and early in college. And I can only hope that the early progress he's made that his wife has mentioned continues. At age 60, he's far too young. While thinking of Guerrero, I dug out this card, which is his first solo card. I had planned this week to write another post in my Start and Finish series , so why not start with one of my favorites? The problem with Guerrero is I don't own the final card of him issued during his career. I have a thing about actually having the cards for this series (which is really going to limit me for people who started o...

More on these guys later. Last week, in a fit of laziness/writer's block, I wondered who the scariest-looking players in baseball history were. I received a variety of responses. I will try to show most of them here. As I clarified in the comments, by "scary" I meant, "this guy looks like he wants to kill me" scary. So, although folks like Otis Nixon and Willie McGee and Zane Smith, look "scary" in an "unfortunate-but-his-mom-still-loves-him" kind of way, that's not what I was going for. What I was going for is this: Maybe Randy Johnson is "ugly scary," too. But there is no doubt that there were a few batters that feared for their life facing him. He had the ability, and he definitely had the look, which is the main point of this post. The intent was to find players so frightening-looking that it set the "human fear response" into motion. Like this guy. He certainly featured an intense look on the mound. Th...