Night Owl Cards

  Ever since my mother passed away on Mother's Day four years ago, the holiday has become a bittersweet one. That, combined with little night owl flying the nest around the same time, makes Mother's Day much more low-key around here. It's simpler. No calls home. No trips. No reservations most times (neither the wife or me can stand crowds). Thank goodness the wife is such a cutey, or who knows if I could get inspired anymore. The empty nest has changed things, too. Mrs. Night Owl is more into sports than she ever was during our first 30 years together. She's gotten into baseball a little bit, enjoying the game broadcasts, even if only as background noise. But when the Dodgers on, she will pay attention. Really though, she likes football. She's a Buffalo girl. The Bills are her team and, unlike me who puts football out of my mind during the offseason, she's looking around for any football tidbit she can find. Like what movies Josh Allen is watching and that kind ...

    Major League Baseball has designated pink as the color for Mother's Day at its ballparks for the past dozen years or so. Topps has followed suit with pink parallels that are not called "pink parallels" but "Mother's Day parallels." This is the first one of those type of parallels that I landed. But I haven't bothered to find that many more. They're not cheap and because Topps has numbered them so low, usually just 50 available, they're tough to find. I find it odd that Topps has made pink such an exclusive color. In the world that I grew up in, pink was not exclusive on cards. It was everywhere on cards. All I have to do is show you one card from the 1975 Topps set, the first set I collected. This was life in the '70s. Colors weren't exclusive. They weren't featured only on "sometimes cards," if you could afford them or get lucky. They were in just about every damn pack. I've always been a fan of the pink-yellow card...

  For years, the phrase "mother's cookies" meant to me exactly that: the cookies my mom baked. In fact, I would have looked at you oddly if you said, "mother's cookies." Why the need to be so formal? Nobody calls her "mother." She's mom! Mother's cookies -- or Mom's cookies -- makes me think of all the cookies my mom made, those ones I'll never have again. Like most kids, I think my mom made the best cookies and nobody else's mom could come close. She didn't make anything exotic, but what she made tasted better than anything else: the best chocolate-chip cookies, the best peanut butter cookies, at Christmas time, the best cream-cheese cookies. It's rude but it's true, sometimes I'd go over to a friend's house and have one of their mom's cookies and I'd want to spit it out: "these aren't mom's cookies!"   I've lived on the East Coast all my life, so I knew nothing about the Calif...

I was wracking my brain earlier today trying to come up with a Mother's Day post. But then I realized something. First, there are three mothers who are a big part of my life. One lives in the house with me, the other is her mom, and the other is my mom. All three of them couldn't give a damn about baseball cards. Not only that, but they don't care about baseball or sports in general really. They certainly don't care about what's written here. Second, I wrote what I had to say about my mom and baseball last year . That sums it up. So, given that, I think I have the green light for: A GINORMOUS, SPECTACULAR TRADE POST EXTRAVAGANZA!!!!!!!!! And on we go!!!!!!! These first cards are from Jim of  GCRL . He always seems to be able to track down a Nebulous 9 need. This was the last 1986 Donruss Dodger that I needed to complete that wretched-looking set. The Nebulous 9 list is now eight cards. I'll get to work on getting back to nine. A pair of ...

I was watching the Mets game this afternoon, looking at the players stride to the plate wearing bright, pink wristbands and swinging bright, pink bats. It's been the tradition on Mother's Day the last few years. The Mets' play-by-play announcer, Gary Cohen, remarked on how many more mothers were at the ballpark on Mother's Day than when he was a kid. He noted that it had become a tradition to bring your mom to the ballpark. But, he said, it wasn't always that way. I had noticed the same thing. When I was growing up, I didn't know one single adult woman who was interested in baseball. My mother has sat through hundreds of baseball games over the years, but none of those games were in a ballpark because we could never get her to go. Instead, she saw baseball on television or heard it on the radio as her three baseball-crazed sons found a game every chance they'd get and in any way possible. To this day, when I visit her or she visits me and she sees a game on...