Night Owl Cards

(Today is National Waiters and Waitresses Day. One of my favorite things to do is eat at a restaurant and I have great respect for table-servers, and from the time I was a bus boy have tried to tip them more than what is standard. They know the value of work. Time for Cardboad Appreciation. This is the 282nd in a series): This is one more card from my COMC Spring Cleaning shopping spree and it is probably my favorite out of all of them. I didn't know it existed until it popped up in an unrelated search. I am familiar with the '89 Bill Pucko Cards and the design from that year. But all of my knowledge came from the Niagara Falls Rapids team set from that same year and those cards feature red borders. This was the most notable card from that set, according to me: This is the card where I make my trading card debut . I'm the guy in the press box, fourth window from the left, talking to the scorekeeper in the fifth window. I kept all of the cards in that Rapids ...

I recently came across something that I thought I had thrown out a long time ago. It was a folder filled with reference type material from my first season of covering a professional baseball team, the now-defunct Niagara Falls Rapids. I've mentioned the team a time or  two . Like me, they were in their first season, too, in 1989. They played in the short-season Class A New York-Penn League. Throughout that year, we figured things out together. A lot has changed since 1989. Not only do the Rapids not exist, but many of the teams that were in the NY-P at the time do not exist. Also, entire careers have come and gone since that season and that's what I want to address. In the folder were rosters from almost all of the NY-P teams in the league at the time. It was interesting to look back at those rosters and see which players had made it to the majors. Apparently, I had done it once before, because there were marks next to the names of the players who were big-leaguers. ...

One still common misconception about the life of sportswriters is that their job is glamorous. Rubbing elbows with the professional sports elite, munching on free food, watching ball games for nothing, what's not to like? My personal favorite is when people assume we watch games on TV at home and then write about what transpired. If that happened, then my job WOULD be fantastic. That doesn't mean I don't think that there are pleasant parts to my job. If I didn't, I wouldn't be doing this Brush With Greatness series. It's just that this is not a job in which every moment is a "Dear Diary, the most wonderful thing happened to me today" moment. For instance, the interview with a professional ballplayer. To many, this would be the highlight. Isn't that what autograph hunters aspire to -- a chance to communicate, up-close, with a professional player? But as a sports reporter, things are somewhat different. First of all, players don't se...

I am so freaking tired right now. A bloody 13-hour work day has robbed me of my love for blogging. So, I'll see how this goes. If it doesn't make sense, I promise I'll come back tomorrow (or later today) refreshed, renewed and ready to write about something ridiculous. Ivan Cruz played just 41 games in the major leagues, coming up with the Yankees in 1997, then playing with the Pirates in 1999 and 2000 and the Cardinals in 2002. He never played for the Tigers in the major leagues, despite what Bowman is showing you on this card. But I did talk to Cruz when he was a member of the Tigers organization, a long time before he hit the majors. He was in his first year in pro ball, way back in 1989, when he was a member of the Tigers' single A team in Niagara Falls. It was the first feature story I ever did on a professional athlete. And because it was a baseball player, I was freaked out of my mind. My editor had told me to find someone on the team that would be wor...

When I look at baseball cards or famous sports photos in which fans are visible in the stands, I often wonder whether any of those fans discover that they are forever immortalized in the photograph. I would love to be there when someone looks at the photograph and realizes that he or she is on the card. What a great moment that would be. There are hundreds and hundreds of photographs, whether on cards or in magazines or yearbooks, in which fans' faces are visible. But not once have I heard of anyone saying that they appeared in a published photograph as a spectator. There are famous photos of identified spectators in the stands, but I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about the anonymous fans watching a game. I'd love to hear their stories. Here's my story: I did appear on a baseball card. Although when you see it, you're going to be pretty disappointed. It's still kind of neat in its own small way. As a young sportswriter, I covered a new minor...