Night Owl Cards

  Ron Hodges passed away just about two weeks ago. Unless you're a Mets fan, you may not remember him. I barely remember him from the time I watched Mets games on WOR with my grandfather. I remember him more from my baseball cards.   Hodges was a longtime backup catcher for the Mets and just the Mets. He was there for about a dozen years. You probably couldn't get away with that today -- well, you could but not without a bunch of people crabbing on social media about how you don't hit and what's wrong with management and get rid of this guy already.   Hodges was 74 and I'm pretty used to players from my childhood passing away now, but it hit me a little bit harder. While thinking about it over the last few days, I realized it might be because Hodges played during my collecting sweet spot -- and only during my collecting sweet spot.   That collecting sweet spot is also what I refer to as "my first collecting period." I've probably listed this before but...

There is a clipping pinned to a bulletin board at work just as you walk into the sports department. It is a copy of a high school sports game write-up from another newspaper. It's your typical roundup item, two paragraphs long. But those two paragraphs are so error-filled -- nine lines of text and about eight things wrong with them -- that the correction that the paper ran the next day is twice the size of the original roundup item. This amused me so much that I had to pin both items side-by-side onto the bulletin board. In the newspaper world, this is one of our greatest fears, that you will attempt to correct an error and just make things worse. So in typical black-humor fashion, I posted one of our greatest fears for all to see. I have never witnessed so many errors committed in one tiny space. Until I came across this Larry Milbourne card that I recently posted on my 1985 Topps blog. The back of that card is a treasure trove of mistakes. First, let's addre...