Night Owl Cards

When I say I'm not collecting any 2012 Topps, that means I'm not collecting ANY 2012 Topps, in all its forms. Heritage, Opening Day, Attax, Update, Allen & Ginter (gulp), none of it. I'm reasonably confident that I will be able to stick to this. Even if I grab a few packs every so often, there's nothing there that's going to make me chase the set. However, Allen & Ginter is the one that could give me some hesitation. It's not for the reasons you might think. I'm beyond the design (two straight years of disappointing designs will do that). I'm beyond the non-ballplayer subjects. I'm even beyond the quirkiness (there wasn't much quirkiness in last year's set). No, the problem I'm going to have is next summer when everyone gets their boxes of A&G and the latest edition of Gint-a-Cuffs commences. As a three-time Gint-a-Cuffs participant, I know that GAC is a heck of a lot of fun. It's even fun for a loser like me w...

I always thought the practice of a pitcher or other player putting his glove over his face when he talked a bit odd. It looks extra strange when there are two or three players talking to each other on the mound, and they all have their gloves over their faces. I know why they do it. They're afraid someone on an opposing team is watching a telecast of the game and trying to read their lips. But my question is, what kind of scarred-for-life moment caused almost every player to do this whenever there is a conference on the mound? Because don't you think someone had to be really successful in reading lips for this "talking into my glove" practice to become epidemic in baseball? If there was a famous moment when some team capitalized on information gleaned from reading lips, I'd love to know about it. I'm trying to remember how long this has been going on. Ten years maybe? It certainly wasn't happening when I was watching games growing up. Maybe it's jus...

I kind of lost it in the comments over on one of the blogs the other day. Perhaps you saw it . It was regarding the man you see right here. I prattled on for too long, and I hate that I did that on someone else's blog. So, I might as well make it a post. And a night card post, at that. You're not going to find a lot of people outside of Boston who will defend Josh Beckett. He rubs people the wrong way. He's aggressive, a bit cranky, and can be mean on the field. His pitch in the general direction of Bobby Abreu's head enraged, shall we say, a few people. It certainly irked the Angels. Was it intentional? I don't know. I think it could've been. Was it intentionally meant for an area above Abreu's shoulders? I have no idea how you prove that. Beckett says the pitch was where it was because time was called so late that he had to let the pitch go, not knowing where it would end up, rather than pull it back and risk injuring himself. He says pitchers are taught ...

The folks at Dinged Corners Inc. are probably zonked out in an exhausted heap after reading, compiling and summarizing all those blog bat-around posts . A fine job, by the way. So I'm not going to interrupt their well-deserved slumber to inform them that they ask the best questions. The blog bat-around question was just one example. They're forever coming up with questions that I'm just dying to answer. I don't know how they do it but they would make fantastic prosecutors. One question would make any hostile witness spill his guts. In fact, put Greg Anderson, Barry Bonds' best zipped-lip bud, in front of DC. I think we'd get the who, what, where, when, how and why pretty quickly. I bring this up because of a question they recently asked the other day. They wanted to know if they were any players that I didn't actively collect that I was happy to get anyway. I was surprised that more didn't answer this question. But I decided to repeat my answer here. Af...