Night Owl Cards

  Today is Father's Day, which as I've mentioned before means doing what I want to do, and only that, all day.   For some that may mean boating, fishing, golfing, going to a ballgame, some of the typical stuff. For me, and most Father's Days now, it means nerding out over baseball cards. As pathetic as that may seem to some people -- probably most people -- I'm perfectly happy doing this. What? You want me to go to Dave & Busters? Come on. So I've got something here that will interest a very limited amount of people. Heck probably most readers and bloggers don't care. But that doesn't matter today on the day of doing what I want. I've long been interested in the phenomenon of players disappearing from card sets. They're in a card set year after year and suddenly they vanish, and then they appear again!   This happens a lot, but you need to pay attention year after year. A very specific example of this is when a player does not come to an agreeme...

Today is the 70th birthday for two of the greatest Dodgers players of the 1970s, Reggie Smith and Don Sutton. Because they share the exact same birthday and they both starred for the Dodgers at the same time, Smith and Sutton have been linked in my mind since I was a kid. April 2, 1945. I've known the date by heart. Smith and Sutton don't resemble each other much except in their ability to excel at baseball. Smith, of course, competed at the plate and Sutton at the mound. Sutton was raised a Dodger, while Smith came to L.A. in the prime of his career. But my brain always pairs them up together. When collecting cards in the late '70s, and alphabetizing my Dodgers, Smith and Sutton were very close together. Only Elias Sosa separated them. Then, for one glorious year -- in 1979 -- Smith and Sutton were back-to-back, as they should be (then in 1980, Rick Sutcliffe stepped between them). Page 38 of the 1979 Dodgers yearbook is Reggie Smith's page. On the fa...

Don't just stand there like some slack-jawed yokel! It's 2013! Time to get moving! Time to act! Time to ignore whatever is new, cool, hip, groovy, fab, gnarly, rad, awesome, dope, sweet and sick about this year's cardboard and focus on vintage!!! This new year is the Year Of Vintage, and that will be my focus for at least the next 12 months, but probably longer. Last night on the twitters there was a mild discussion about what constitutes "vintage" in the cardboard world. There are lots of opinions on this. Unlike certain antiques, there is no definite time period in cardboard that is defined as "vintage." "Vintage" is more like a measurement. Select a certain year in the past as the starting point of vintage and everything from that point and previous to it is "vintage." But when does vintage begin? I've often thought about it as whatever card set was issued 25 years ago. That's the starting point of vintage. S...

Today is National Left-Handers' Day . As a left-hander all of my life, I'm ashamed to admit that I didn't know there was a day reserved for me. And that they've been doing it since 1976. I thought of a way that I could make it up to myself, and of course those thoughts involve the blog and baseball cards. But before I get to that, a little perspective on life as a lefty. As you might have heard, it's not easy -- obnoxious right-handed desks in school, getting pen marks on your hand every time you write, operating a mouse on the right-handed side because we wouldn't dare subject a right-hander to using their left hand when operating the computer. In school the teacher would pull a container filled with scissors and distribute them to the kids during whatever scissor-cutting exercise was taking place. If I was very lucky -- and by "lucky" I mean maybe once every other year -- I'd find a pair of left-handed scissors. And then I remember one t...