Night Owl Cards

  Is this a new series? I think it might be. I was attempting to hunt down a new angle for the "Joy of a Team Set" series a week or two ago, but I'm starting to feel like I've run out of ideas for that series. I'm not going to end it, I may have just hit a temporary snag, but I thought I'd go in a slightly different direction. I've praised the common, ordinary subset many times on this blog and have devoted a full post to individual ones here and there. I've even written a magazine article focused on them. Subsets seem like a fad of the past, with inserts taking over in the mid-to-late '90s. But the subset still appears periodically. However, I don't count a group of cards as subsets if they are not numbered consecutively in a set. That's the first rule of defining a subset. (Topps, start grouping your league leader cards together again, please). Subsets have been part of main sets since the 1950s, probably longer. During the '50s and ...

  Apologies for the morbid post, but I'm discovering that this is going to be a difficult time of year for me from now on. My mom passed away two years ago on Mother's Day and my dad a month later. It's the second anniversary of that time period and the fragility of life is naturally on my mind. It doesn't help that the players on my baseball cards keep leaving. Nothing underlines one's mortality quite like the news that another player whose card you collected as a kid has died. I periodically recognize those recently departed players from my youth with individual posts but those passings of players from the very first set I ever collected -- 1975 Topps -- have been coming so frequently this year that I can't keep up. Often I'm just too shocked to write anything (For frequent commenter, steelehere, who often randomly mentions a former Dodger player's death on my posts, I do pay tribute to them on Twitter, even if I don't mention it on the blog. Here ...

I've been fairly dismissive about Topps Big in the past. To me, it was a half-baked imitation of truly the greatest Topps set of all-time, the 1956 set. But some of my disinterest in the Big sets comes from simply being unaware of those Big cards for years. I didn't notice them when they came out, and for years they weren't a thought. So, when I saw them for the first time, say 8 or 9 years ago, they seemed cheap, fitting in perfectly with the other junk wax of the time. When creating my Dodger team want lists, the Topps Big lists were ragged and incomplete. And I didn't care. Because it was a weird tribute set that was too Big to fit into regular pages. It took nearly 10 years for me to realize that I didn't even have the 1990 Topps Big set on my want list. And it also took me nearly 10 years (from first realizing what the heck this set was) to complete one of the team sets. Thanks to Bryan of Golden Rainbow Cards , I've finally finished off the 1988...

I saw an interesting factoid from High Heat Stats MLB a couple of days ago. It said that with Clayton Kershaw winning both the NL Cy Young Award and the MVP Award that it was the sixth time that the Dodgers have done that since the Cy Young was first awarded in 1956. High Heat Stats said it was "astounding," so I assumed that the Dodgers have done this more often than any other major league team. Eager to latch on to any superior news about my team these days, I did a quick bit of research and the Dodgers do indeed hold the record. The team closest to them is the Tigers, who have won the Cy Young Award and MVP in the same year four times, including twice in the last four years. In order to accomplish this feat, it helps to have dominant pitchers. There is still a bias against awarding a pitcher the MVP award (I've long since come over from that side of thinking, I mean, who cares). So if you're going to sway a majority of the voters, you're going to ha...