Night Owl Cards

(June greetings everyone. The suckiness is about to end. That is all. Time for Cardboard Appreciation. This is the 144th in a series): Remember when you thought that a cool photo of a player on a card automatically signaled great things for that player in the upcoming season? In 1981, I was already a world-weary teenager. But I still clung to that childhood fantasy. When I pulled this card of Len Barker and basked in its action-packed awesomeness, I just knew that his 1980 season, in which he won 19 games and struck out 187 batters, could not be a fluke. The card didn't let me down. On May 15th of that year, Barker pitched a perfect game against the Blue Jays. I remember reading about it the following morning as I filled my newspaper bag before heading out on my paper route. That was my form of Sportscenter back in '81. Barker would go on to another decent season in 1982 -- his slightly less fantastic but still cool '82 Topps card signaled what was about to ha...

I was always a pretty good student in school. Even through the toughest math classes in high school, I'd end up with decent grades. I had one math teacher who was particularly demanding, particularly tough and liked to yell. Only the smartest of the smart made it through his classes unscathed. Unfortunately, I wasn't one of those unscathed. I would start out "scathed" and then build slowly through the year until I was kind of half-scathed or a quarter-scathed. My teacher recognized this, and he would do something that rattled me every time he said it. He would pass out the results of a particularly nonsensical math test, something that only the braniacs in the class could survive, and yell about the low grades he was handing out. Then he's give me my paper and he'd say, sort of so I was the only one who could hear: "Night Owl, you know better than that." (Yes, even then they called me "night owl." What? You don't believe me?) "You...