Night Owl Cards

  For several years on this blog, I wrote an annual "if I was king of the postseason" post to kick off the baseball playoffs. It was fun -- just me riffing on who my favorites and least favorites were for that particular year -- but it was a lot of work. Then it started getting repetitive/monotonous and also a couple people got their undies in a bunch about what I wrote. I don't need to be dedicating a lot of time to something just to get a bunch of grief out of it, so I stopped. I don't miss it. But I do miss writing about the postseason a little. I thought it'd be fun to take a look at each of the wild card matchups in a lighthearted fashion -- no overt rooting here -- with the help of TCDB and my collection. I'm going to take a look at the oldest and newest cards in my collection for each team, plus a random card selected by the TCDB randomizer. There are some interesting connections between these teams. Here we go: RANGERS VS. RAYS Texas Rangers (cards in ...

I collect cards for my own amusement. It's been that way for 40 years. There is nothing to this hobby besides accumulation for me. Except for a few fits and starts, I have rarely considered selling cards because I think this hobby should be as free of real world problems as possible. The formula should be simple: Have a little extra cash for cards? Buy cards. Enjoy cards. Repeat. But after 40 years, that formula becomes less and less practical. I have lots of cards, but the space for them is shrinking by the year. I also have lots of cards that are practically useless to me. They don't fit in my collection and they're not easy to trade. And, of course, any kind of extra money would be helpful. So, I'm considering again selling cards. Only a bit more seriously this time. There has to be someone out there who is a Rays collector or a David DeJesus collector. If the blogs won't take care of my excess parallels then maybe ebay or COMC will. I have resist...

I just got finished with a long day of summer vacation stuff and I was looking forward to playing Allen & Ginter Box Buster Bingo over at Crackin' Wax . Unfortunately, the internet was down for like an hour and now I'm beating on the door at CW seeing if they'll let in someone over an hour late, but having no success. So, trade post it is!!!! It was either that or finding something interesting in my latest A&G purchases. And while I look at people who moan about A&G the same way I look at that one person who says "but I don't like chocolate," I will be nice and lay off the A&G for at least one post. I received a stack of Dodger cards from my good man, The Cardboard Don , recently. As you know, he's a Marlins fan. He even stuck this card of Ozzie Guillen -- the current Marlins manager -- in with the Dodgers. I like Ozzie. I've said that before . I know he says stupid stuff. I know he ticks people off. I don't care. I st...

Ever since photoshopping became commonplace, Topps has been going to town, putting players into their new team's uniforms, putting fences in front of bat boys on team cards, removing umpires out of photographs, you know, basically playing God with photographs. You would think I would have a huge issue with this given that my job includes discussions about The Journalistic Integrity of Photographs. And it's true, I actually have a difficult time with certain Topps photoshopping, mostly erasing people from the photo or moving an entire crowd of fans into a different stadium. But I don't have an issue with altering the uniforms. Topps has been doing this for decades -- back when it was called airbrushing -- and it doesn't bother me, probably because I've been seeing it since I was 9. Even though I mentioned in the last post the photos that were photoshopped from the cards out of my blaster of Opening Day, it was only for informational purposes. It wasn't bec...

The Teal Phenomenon that swept the country during the early 1990s fascinated me. I've never seen one color emerge out of nowhere so quickly in the sporting world. It became the color of choice for expansion teams. The Marlins in baseball, the Jaguars and Panthers in football, the Sharks in hockey, and the Hornets in the NBA. The color signified excitement and daring. Come see the new team with wild colors! Those stodgy, old teams would never wear teal. Squares. People started displaying teal caps everywhere. Even I owned -- and wore -- a teal Marlins cap for a period (it was not pretty). The teal fad has pretty much faded away. Oh, there are teams that still feature the color. The Sharks and Jaguars still consider teal as one of their team colors. The Marlins prefer to call it "Marlin blue" now, whatever that is. The Panthers call their color "Panther blue." I've never seen a blue panther. But for my purposes here, I'm calling the color used wit...