Night Owl Cards

The Dodgers last night clinched their 16th division championship since arriving in Los Angeles in 55 years ago. They celebrated with a pool party (scandalous!), and I am thrilled that I now have two weeks to go before I start sweating out the Cardinals and/or Braves and, hopefully, the Red Sox. It's enough time, in fact, for me to consider my favorite Dodger card that was issued in each of the team's championship seasons. And I went through and found favorites for each of those years. I wanted to add the Brooklyn teams, too, but I'm embarrassingly short on 1940s cards. You could also make a case for each of these being the "best" Dodger cards of those years, but I don't want to get into that. I'd like to be a fan for today and be partisan and biased and irrational. You know, all those things that make a fan great. It's interesting how some of these cards are borderline iconic. That's what happens when you win or reach a championship. You e...

My hair is longer than it's ever been in my life. It's not roadie length yet, but I've always worn my hair relatively short. It only ventured past my ears during my high school years, but that was kind of the thing to do in the early '80s. I'll probably get it cut eventually, but with this mid-life-crisis frame of mind that I'm in, I kind of like it. It reminds me of my favorite ballplayers and rock n' roll musicians from the 1970s. Really, if there was any place that I could be, I'd like to plant myself in the free-wheelin, easy-feeling '70s, fully equipped with shoulder length hair and a stache. One of my favorite parts of the '70s was the easy going music of that time. Yeah, I know it gets bagged on a lot because of sappy awful "Seasons in the Sun" stuff. But I dug and still dig Jim Croce, America, Olivia Newton-John, the Carpenters, James Taylor, all of it. It takes me back to a time when there wasn't a lot of angst. In m...

I received a package of shiny in the mail the other day from Mark of Mark's Ephemera . Mark and I have conversed several times via email over the months, and as chance would have it, my wife actually will be traveling past Mark's town of residence next week while on a business trip. They probably won't meet -- unless my wife and her posse's rental car suddenly acts up -- but it's always good to know there's a friendly blogger willing to help out. Plus, he's already provided some good sight-seeing tips. See, hon, this blogging thing is really paying off for both of us! But, of course, the best part of blogging is opening a package in the mail and squinting because there's so much shiny in there! Mark sent me a stack of 2004 Topps Traded Chrome, because he knows I like sparkly things. Cool. One of the best kinds of chrome cards are ones that feature scoreboards in the background like on the Brian Jordan card. I know you can't tell what I'm talkin...